Data compression company Beamr makes a product to compress
imagery and video, without comprising any quality.
By Karin Kloosterman, ISRAEL21c
Data compression company Beamr is
not able to send an actual person through cyberspace, but their technology does
promise to deliver us humanoids “life” quality video at warp speed.
The company’s made-in-Israel core technology works to compress
imagery and video, without comprising quality. Beamr’s tuned algorithms manage
to make compression adjustments to visual data, essentially optimizing a file
size, while the naked eye notices nothing.
This is really big news for personal computer users, e-commerce
sites and the streaming media market.
For everyday folks, Beamr can scale down images straight off
your laptop, in the cloud or through Dropbox, clearing up as much as 80 percent
of the allocated drive space.
Going from 100 gigabytes to just 30 “makes a lot of space left
over for other stuff,” says Dror Gill, CTO of Beamr: “You can search on Twitter
and see how much praise we get from users.”
People can do image optimization manually, but Beamr does this
automatically and en masse, and just to the point where image artifacts would
be noticed by the eye. (A possible downside: compression effects cannot be
reversed.)
Buffers video download time
But the big news and business development is in video, Gill
says. About 10 major companies, some from Hollywood, are testing out the
software to see if it can alleviate media streaming flow issues.
People want video on demand, not video that stops with Brad Pitt
in mid-air or mid-kiss. They want Blu-ray quality. They want the latest and
they want it now.
This is where Beamr is hoping to rake in the big bucks: “From
Blu-ray disks or video cameras we can optimize the video [by compressing it]
five times and yet it still looks exactly like the quality of a Blu-ray film,”
says Gill.
“We could take streaming videos of Netflix or Hulu and reduce
them by 20 to 50 percent of their size. This offers a very important advantage
to the providers because when you reduce the bit rate, there is less buffering
and the user is very happy. It can also reduce delivery costs,” Gil adds.
For consumers in Canada who pay for bandwidth, the cost savings
for them could be significant.
The product was launched in September at the International Broadcasting
Convention in Amsterdam and an evaluation version is now installed in three of
the largest Hollywood studios, according to Gil.
“We haven’t sold a product yet, but 10 customers are evaluating
it for streaming their premium content. We can promise a return of investment
in 30 days,” he boasts. “You save on every delivery.”
Like many Israeli high-tech success stories, there is often a
secret or powerful IDF intelligence unit at its core. Beamr’s founders aren’t
from the illustrious Unit 8200 intelligence group, but its founder Sharon
Carmel helped develop battleground simulation software.