Amazon quietly acquired video messaging app firm Biba for its patents and employees in 2015; sources say Amazon will announce new video chat service this month
Amazon's purchases of Twitch and Elemental Technologies appear to be only two parts of a bigger strategy at the company …
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon's video ambitions have been assembling piece by piece: the $970M Twitch bet positioned it ahead of Facebook and Google in the scramble to own live video, and the Elemental Technologies purchase reportedly around $500M put video processing inside AWS. Today's report reveals a quieter third move — Biba, a video messaging startup acquired in 2015 explicitly for its patents and employees.
First-order effects
- The Biba deal stops being an anonymous acqui-hire: sources say Amazon will announce a new video chat service this month, built on the patents and team it absorbed in 2015.
- Amazon enters consumer video chat with infrastructure rivals lack in-house — Elemental's processing already powers new AWS services, so the chat stack runs on Amazon's own cloud.
Second-order effects
- Facebook and Google, already jockeying with Amazon over live video per the Twitch coverage, now face it in messaging-grade video calling too — a second front on top of streaming.
- AWS gains a showcase workload: a consumer-scale video chat service demonstrates the Elemental-built pipeline to enterprise customers evaluating video infrastructure.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Amazon keeps buying capability quietly and announcing products loudly — the same playbook Twitch later extended by picking up Bebo for its esports business — consolidating video assets across live, cloud, and chat under one owner.
The trend: Amazon is assembling a full-stack video business through successive acquisitions — Twitch for live, Elemental for processing, Biba for chat — rather than competing category by category.