Apple acquired a startup using AI to compress videos

News Summary

  • Leveraging AI-powered scene and object detection, the startup’s technology could essentially “understand” a video frame, allowing it to, for example, prioritize faces at the expense of other elements within a scene to save bandwidth.WaveOne also claimed that its video compression tech was robust to sudden disruptions in connectivity.
  • Even minor improvements in video compression could save on bandwidth costs, or enable services like Apple TV+ to deliver higher resolutions and framerates depending on the type of content being streamed.YouTube’s already doing this.
  • “We started our journey at WaveOne, realizing that machine learning and deep learning video technology could potentially change the world.
  • Apple saw this potential and took the opportunity to add it to their technology portfolio.”WaveOne was founded in 2016 by Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel, who set out to take the decades-old paradigm of video codecs and make them AI-powered.
  • Prior to the Apple acquisition, WaveOne attracted $9 million from backers including Khosla Ventures, Vela Partners, Incubate Fund, Omega Venture Partners and Blue Ivy.So what might Apple want with an AI-powered video codec?
  • Apple has quietly acquired a Mountain View-based startup, WaveOne, that was developing AI algorithms for compressing video.Apple wouldn’t confirm the sale when asked for comment.
Apple has quietly acquired a Mountain Viewbased startup, WaveOne, that was developing AI algorithms for compressing video.Apple wouldnt confirm the sale when asked for comment. But WaveOnes webs [+3215 chars]