V-Nova Ltd., a leading provider of video compression solutions, today announced the completion of its first acquisition, by purchasing the full global patent portfolio of video imaging experts Faroudja Enterprises Inc. for an undisclosed sum.
Faroudja Enterprises Inc. was founded by video pioneer and multiple Emmy Award winner Yves Faroudja, and the acquisition of its patent portfolio is a strong investment by V-Nova in its own long-term technology roadmap. The addition of the Faroudja technology will further improve the efficiency of V-Nova’s compression technology PERSEUS™ and ensure that it continues to be at the forefront of next-generation video services.
Guido Meardi, V-Nova CEO & Co-Founder, said of the acquisition: “These are exciting times for V-Nova and our customers, as we continue to expand our capabilities and grow internationally. New, disruptive technologies such as Ultra-HD TV, 360 video, VR immersive video and high quality video transmission on any network can all significantly benefit from solutions that reduce the bandwidth requirements in a cost-effective and scalable way. By acquiring the highly complementary patents of Faroudja Enterprises’ ground-breaking solutions, we are enhancing our ability to achieve this even further. Faroudja’s technology has already been demonstrated to provide a bitrate reduction of 35-50% over an existing compression technique. A tighter integration with V-Nova’s PERSEUS will leverage the codec’s own bitrate reduction performance to provide even greater benefits.”
The acquired patent portfolio consists of the Faroudja pre-processor (for use prior to compression) and post-processor (after compression decoding). The system also includes techniques for video enhancement such as multidimensional video processing as well as the use of a unique support layer in parallel with the conventional compression path. The Faroudja scheme complements compression standards such as MPEG-2, h.264, HEVC and – of course – PERSEUS.
Michelle Abraham, Senior Research Analyst with Media & Communications at S&P Global Market Intelligence commented on the acquisition of Faroudja Enterprises’ IP by V-Nova: “Encoding in the cloud is increasingly important to compression companies and we can see evidence of this already through the growing prominence of software encoding. Portfolio acquisitions such as the one between V-Nova and Faroudja Enterprises demonstrate the importance of continuing to advance video compression technology to ensure high quality video can be transmitted across all types of networks.”
The Faroudja patent portfolio strengthens V-Nova’s existing software solutions, without requiring modifications to the standard codec. V-Nova is therefore able to fully leverage the value of Faroudja Enterprises’ patents within V-Nova PERSEUS, consolidating the unique competitive advantage of the platform as the only hierarchical and fully parallel coding format on the market.
Yves Faroudja, President of Faroudja Enterprises, said: “Our patent portfolio has been developed through years of experience in award-winning image processing and video compression. We are pleased that our innovation and hard work in developing industry-leading patents will now contribute to V-Nova’s wider global strategy to enable operators and service providers to connect more people with high quality content, even when challenged by bandwidth constraints.”
