Storage company, Box has announce that they are acquiring Streem, a Y-Combinator-backed startup focused on letting you get to all of your content in the cloud, right on your desktop. The entire team at Streem will be joining Box to help work on the future of content management and collaboration in the enterprise.

According to Box CEO and Co-Founder, Streem has developed amazing technology that allows you to mount a cloud drive onto your computer — making documents, presentations, videos and files available to you without the limitations of your local hard-disk, effectively turning the cloud into an “unlimited” drive. Rather than files living directly on your computer’s disk, they are instead securely “streamed” to you on demand when you need to interact with them. And to further optimize the experience and support low-bandwidth environments, Streem has developed enhanced video and media streaming technology to ensure content is accessible from the cloud as fast as it is locally.

As it stands today, Box’s core sync functionality lets you keep files and folders in sync across mobile and desktop platforms. But that still requires a copy to be kept locally if you want to make any changes. There are administrative controls available to restrict what users can do with those local copies, and in some scenarios (like previewing on mobile files), no local copy is actually cached.

Streem is so focused on video content, in fact, that they have a real-time transcoder that compresses and adjusts the quality on streaming video in a manner that can only be described as “Netflix-like.”

For existing Streem customers, you’ll have the option of either importing your content to Box or else downloading it all in a zip file for your own purposes. Streem is promising more details on this offboarding process soon.  Box is very purposely playing it coy as to what form Streem’s technology will take in their platform once the integration is complete.

But with Streem’s technology, there’s one copy of the file that you’re viewing and working with live. It looks like it lives on your desktop, but it’s really a file in the cloud. Streem put this technology to work with Streem Drive, an unlimited cloud storage service that used aggressive deduplication and its seamless streaming to keep costs down. 

There’s no timeline for when Streem’s technology will get integrated into the Box platform, according to Levie. But when it does, he says, Box will reap two key benefits.

First off, Streem will make accessing and working with larger files easy, even when the local disk doesn’t have enough room. that’s especially important for huge digital media files used by the entertainment industry, or massive data files used in industries like oil and gas.

 

Second, Streem will give users in regulated industries like finance or health services more control over where their data lives, giving users access to the files without having to worry that they’re storing it on an unsecured device.

{loadposition content_starwind600}