V-Nova claims compression paradigm rewrite
April 1, 2015
By Colin Mann
Emerging from ‘stealth’ mode as it refined its technology over a five-year period with a range of industry partners, video compression solutions specialist V-Nova has released a number of products based on its PERSEUS technology, suggesting its performance shifts the entire video bitrate-quality curve, offering UHD quality at HD bitrates, HD at SD bitrates, and SD video at audio bitrates.
PERSEUS has been developed and tested over the past five years within an Open Innovation consortium of over 20 global industry leaders including Broadcom, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Intel, and Sky Italia. PERSEUS is currently offered in the form of appliances, embedded software and codec plug-ins.
“With PERSEUS we are able to shift the entire bitrate-quality curve toward the mass population, offering UHD quality at HD bitrates, HD at SD bitrates, and SD video at audio bitrates. This allows our partners to differentiate their products, increase market penetration, and provide new services. In particular, PERSEUS makes 4K commercially viable at scale, enables HD over 3G/4G mobile networks and makes video available to millions who do not yet have it. Most importantly, PERSEUS achieves this within currently available bandwidth and infrastructure,” noted Guido Meardi, CEO and Founder, V-Nova, suggesting that this guaranteed rapid, seamless deployment and an extremely high return on investment.
“PERSEUS helps us solve challenges and create opportunities not currently addressable by existing compression solutions. Sky has been working with V-Nova over the past years to refine and test the PERSEUS technology to ensure that it is industrially scalable and integrates seamlessly into the existing ecosystem and workflows. We are currently deploying it and are extremely satisfied with the results of this joint effort. PERSEUS is an extremely valuable asset for us,” stated Massimo Bertolotti, Head of Innovation and Engineering, Sky Italia.
“The step change in performance offered by PERSEUS opens many opportunities for new high-impact broadcast services that we are contributing to develop,” notes Puiu Dolea, Manager of Business Continuity and Special Projects at European Broadcasting Union (EBU).
Rich Nelson, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Broadband and Connectivity Group, Broadcom Corporation, suggested that combined with Broadcom’s set-top box technology, PERSEUS compression could help enable more efficient HD transmissions and more widespread Ultra HD content to subscribers around the world.
Eric Achtmann, Executive Chairman and co-Founder, V-Nova, said the PERSEUS consortium was solving real-world challenges, at all quality and bandwidth levels, using existing infrastructure and workflows. “Together, we are making ‘The Impossible’ possible, and ‘The Possible’ more profitable,” he concluded.