• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, April 2, 2010

Google has acquired Episodic, the online video hosting platform announced Friday. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The search giant, which has recently been on a buying spree, was long rumored to be eying Episodic's larger and more established video hosting rival Brightcove.

Episodic's technology and staff will now be folded into YouTube, the company's co-founders Noam Lovinsky and Matias Cudich said in a co-authored blog post on Friday.

"The Episodic team will join Google and continue its work to bring a great video experience to the Web, mobile phones and IPTV devices," they said. "There will be no interruption in service for existing Episodic customers."

Episodic's publishing suite lets clients manage and measure video content, as well as use its platform's monetization services for ad insertion and credit card transactions for live as well as on-demand video streaming. The suite helps clients create video libraries and customer meta-data fields, as well as encode video. Its video player, meanwhile, works on both the Web and mobile browsers.

"We have always felt that these are the very early days of online video and that there is far more growth to be had," Lovinsky and Cudich said on Friday. "From our earliest discussions with Google, it was clear that the teams shared this belief and together we obviously see huge potential.... Our product visions were also complimentary."

At present, Episodic is formatted for the iPhone, but support for Android, Blackberry and Symbian mobile devices is on the way, according to the startup. Episodic also offers an ad server that can be used with all major ad-serving platforms, so users can insert ads into videos through a relatively simple process.

Across a number of sectors, Google has been acquiring startups faster than entrepreneurs can get them off the ground.

Last month, it acquired DocVerse -- a startup that helps users collaborate on Microsoft Office documents online. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but The Wall Street Journal reported rumors of a $25 million purchase price. Not long before, Google purchased another cloud-focused startup, Picnik, which lets users edit photos online, and then save their changes "in the cloud" -- before sharing them immediately via Facebook or MySpace.

Earlier this year, Google also purchased reMail -- a popular iPhone application that provides fast full-text search of your Gmail and IMAP email accounts -- for an undisclosed sum, as well as Aardvark, a social search engine, for $50 million.

Late last year, meanwhile, Google bought collaboration toolmaker AppJet -- the company behind real-time collaboration online word processor EtherPad.

Also late last year, rumors were circulating that Google was in talks to buy Brightcove for $500 million to $700 million. Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire repeatedly denied the rumors, saying that his company had plenty of cash on its balance sheet, and even more room to grow.