IMAX makes award-winning debut at IBC 2023
September 22, 2023
IMAX Corporation made an award-winning debut at the IBC 2023 show in Amsterdam. The Company wpn two Best of Show Awards for its Stream Smart product from leading industry publications – TVB Europe and TV Technology – bringing to life its vision of extending the IMAX focus on quality to wherever fans stream content.
In an opening day press conference with media and analysts, IMAX Executives Vikram Arumilli, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Streaming and Consumer Technology and Dr Abdul Rehman, Chief Product Officer, outlined the global strategy for Stream Smart, which was the centerpiece of the IMAX showcase. Dr Hojatollah Yeganeh, principal video architect and research lead, presented an IBC Technical Paper at the Advances in Video Coding and Processing session.
“At IMAX, we believe that creators deserve to have their artistic visions faithfully preserved across every screen, and that fans deserve to experience blockbuster entertainment as it was meant to be seen,” said Arumilli, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Streaming and Consumer Technology, IMAX. “Our Stream Smart technology enables streamers to meet the needs of creators and consumers while reducing costs dramatically, and we’re thrilled that this powerful technology was recognised with two awards at IBC.”
Stream Smart helps streamers encode smarter and save millions of dollars in delivery costs, bridging the widening gap between rising costs and slowing subscriber growth by controlling CDN bandwidth costs without impacting the viewer experience. Stream Smart software overlays on existing workflows to analyse and optimise every frame of video for best picture quality and compression efficiency. It reduces bandwidth by 20 per cent on average while maintaining video quality with minimal workflow changes.
The hallmark of the IBC show is the Technical Papers Programme. This year’s theme was to uncover original solutions for the real-world problem of streaming higher quality, faster and cheaper. IMAX’s Dr Yeganeh presented a study on preserving film grain and keeping filmmakers’ vision intact within computing and network constraints using advanced coding and processing.
During four days at the Amsterdam RAI, IBC hosted more than 1,200 exhibitors and attracted more than 43,000 attendees, an increase of 16 percent over 2022 attendance. A truly global event, IBC was the focal point of media and entertainment technology and business discussion for guests from 170 countries.