Mobile Video Startup Vuclip Buys Jigsee To Target Emerging Markets With Apps

A little consolidation underway in the world of mobile video streaming: Vuclip — a Silicon Valley-based startup that offers mobile video streaming services to across some 200 countries and 5,500 devices — today announced that it is acquiring Jigsee, an app platform created specifically to let content publishers create their own mobile video apps. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but to date Vuclip has raised some $35 million in funding, including a $13 million Series D round in November 2012 from SingTel, NEA and Jafco.

Vuclip and Jigsee were each founded in 2008 and have relatively complementary businesses: most importantly, they both have a strong emphasis on providing video services to emerging markets. Vuclip’s unique selling point is that it allows for mobile video streaming in on to feature phones in low-bandwidth environments. Jigsee has made an early start on offering apps to these same users. Jigsee has extensive operations based out of Mumbai, India, with its headquarters in Ottawa. And in addition to its California base, Vuclip has offices also in New Delhi, Mumbai, Singapore, Dubai, Shenzhen and Beijing.

While Vuclip has up to now largely focused on offering its services through mobile browsers — the larger market up to now, and one in which it has already reached 45 million monthly unique users, with a catalog of some 25 million videos — there are two trends that are pushing it to apps: the growing popularity of native apps has increasingly spilled over into feature phones, and a lot of the emerging market is growing up and increasingly turning to smartphones, and away from feature devices.

Jigsee, which has had 10 million downloads of its platform to-date, will let Vuclip develop apps to offer its services out to market, and also to resell the service to third parties to develop their own native content.

Vuclip also notes that Jigsee owns proprietary video streaming technology, which it  could end up using to improve streaming across all of its services.

“Jigsee saw the same huge opportunity that we did. Consumers in emerging markets are more often than not using low-cost smartphones, such as the Asha Series from Nokia or Android devices from Samsung, on constrained networks,” Nickhil Jakatdar, CEO of Vuclip, said in a statement. “This is a huge audience for the mobile ecosystem to reach – but requires creative problem-solving to ensure a quality user experience.”