Facebook announced that it is acquiring video advertising technology company LiveRail, which counts Major League Baseball, ABC Family, A&E Networks, Gannett, and Dailymotion among its clients.

“We believe that LiveRail, Facebook and the premium publishers it serves have an opportunity to make video ads better and more relevant for the hundreds of millions of people who watch digital video every month,” says Brian Boland, Vice President of Ads Product Marketing and Atlas at Facebook. “More relevant ads will be more interesting and engaging to people watching online video, and more effective for marketers too. Publishers will benefit as well because more relevant ads will help them make the most out of every opportunity they have to show an ad.”

“We’re just getting started with our partnership with LiveRail, but we’re very excited about the future for video publishers and marketers,” he adds. “We believe that LiveRail’s excellent product – known in the industry as a video supply-side platform or SSP – and Facebook’s expertise with relevancy, delivery and measurement will help us make video advertising much better for everyone.”

LiveRail’s Mark Trefgarne writes on the company’s blog:

When we started talking to the team at Facebook about how we could work together, it quickly became clear that we shared a vision for the future of digital advertising. They believed, as we do, that publishers deserve a new generation of audience-aware advertising technology. We realized that by joining forces we’d be able to draw upon our respective strengths to move even faster towards our shared vision of creating the advertising platform of the future.

This announcement marks the beginning of a new chapter for the team at LiveRail, and I’m incredibly grateful to all the amazing people who have helped build this company to where it stands today. I’m confident that as part of the Facebook family, our team has the opportunity to redefine the ad tech landscape and set a new standard in technology for publishers.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though TechCrunch says the price is between $400 and $500 million.

LiveRail claims to deliver over 5 billion ads per month.

Image via LiveRail