Google buys a backbone for pay TV services

Google is snapping up Anvato, a company with tech that's designed to make it easy for broadcasters to put live video online. The system is currently used by plenty of brand-name firms to pump out online video, edit clips in the cloud and handle pay-per-view transactions. Anvato counts companies like NBC and Fox Sports as customers, the former uses it as the backbone for NBC.com, while the latter used it to stream the Super Bowl. Anvato's software and employees will now join Google's cloud platform team, enabling other firms to benefit from what's being called "scalable media processing and workflows in the cloud."

As TV becomes just another part of the internet, it's not simply about which tech company can reinvent (part of) itself as a broadcaster. After all, Google may have already won the war thanks to YouTube, which itself now offers a premium TV option. But away from simply producing stuff for people to watch, there's also plenty of money in the infrastructure underpinning live TV. It's why Microsoft has Azure Media Services (used by the CW) and Amazon has AWS Digital Media, which Netflix uses to process its data. All in all, this move means that Google's dominance over the broadcasting world just got that little bit stronger.