Beamr Imaging Ltd., a world leader in content-adaptive video encoding and optimization solutions, announces the first-of-its-kind commercial implementation of a quality driven content-adaptive HEVC software encoder, Beamr 5x. This innovative product utilizes Beamr’s 29 granted patents and 18 pending patent applications to produce HEVC video encodes that are up to 50% smaller than Beamr’s market-leading HEVC software encoder, Beamr 5.
The consumer expectation for higher video quality is growing, and with HEVC decode capability expanding rapidly across the mobile device, TV, and set-top box ecosystem, the industry is approaching an inflection point where services unable to deliver 1080p in under 2Mbps, and 4K HDR under 10Mbps, will struggle to compete in the crowded entertainment services marketplace. Beamr 5x has been shown to deliver amazingly low bitrates while maintaining unusually high video quality. The innovation at the heart of Beamr 5x is the perceptual optimization technology that powers Beamr’s H.264 content-adaptive video optimizer and JPEGmini image optimization solutions which are used by the world’s largest media & entertainment companies. When combined with the best implementation of the most advanced codec in the market (HEVC), content owners and distributors no longer need to sacrifice quality for bitrate.
“Beamr’s technology has been widely validated by the industry and is in use by major customers in Blu-ray, streaming, and broadcast workflows. With the acquisition of Vanguard Video, Beamr took an important step toward bringing our critical contribution of bitrate savings to the video encoding industry,” comments Beamr President, Eli Lubitch. “With the integration of the Beamr perceptual optimization process and the world’s best HEVC encoder Beamr 5, we are excited to see what new services and business models will be enabled by our customers with Beamr 5x.”
Beamr CTO Dror Gill continues, “Content-adaptive encoding is of great interest to the industry, but until now it has been relegated to mostly manual processes. Beamr’s highly unique quality driven and fully automated operation, utilizes machine learning and advanced video analysis technology to enable the benefits of content-specific encoding to be operated at scale. In workflows such as user generated content, OTT streaming, and cloud DVR, there simply is no match for the ability of Beamr 5x to compress video to the bitrates that we can achieve while maintaining full quality.”
Beamr 5x will be made available as a software SDK with the performance, flexibility, and operational scale of Beamr’s suite of software encoder SDKs. Benchmarked against other advanced codecs such as VP9, Beamr 5x offers an enormous performance, quality, and playback ecosystem lead as all output streams are fully inside the standard of HEVC and 100% compatible with popular ABR streaming mechanisms such as MPEG-DASH and HLS.
Video distributors seeking a solution to the high bandwidth cost of mobile and service operators delivering content into markets where bandwidth is constrained are encouraged to evaluate Beamr 5x for its ability to lower bitrates without compromising video quality. Following NAB, Beamr 5x will be made available for evaluation to qualified MSO, Telco, OTT, and CDN service companies.
Companies interested in a demonstration of the Beamr 5x content-adaptive software encoder SDK are invited to visit Beamr in Booth SU8007 during the NAB show April 24th to April 27th, 2017.
