MediaPost reports that Google has acquired Episodic, an online video hosting platform which will now be incorporated into YouTube. The article says that Episodic's publishing suite allows clients to manage and measure video content, as well as use its platform's monetisation services for ad insertion and credit card transactions for live as well as on-demand video streaming.

The suite of services developed by the company helps clients create video libraries and customer metadata fields, as well as encode video. Its video player works on both the Web and mobile browsers - currently just for the iPhone, but support for Android, Blackberry and Symbian mobile devices is reported to be on the way. 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.

Google has clearly seen the future applications and benefits of the Episodic platform for its video and advertising services and will no doubt be developing these further with the expertise of the staff taken on through the acquisition.