In recent days, the American multinational technology Apple has acquired the company WaveOne, which is dedicated to developing artificial intelligence algorithms to automatically compress videos.
Although Apple has not officially confirmed the purchase, WaveOne’s former head of sales and business development, Bob Stankosh, announced it in a LinkedIn post.
“After almost two years at WaveOne, last week we finalized the sale of the company to Apple,” Stankosh said. “We started our journey realizing that machine learning could change the world. Apple saw this potential and jumped at the opportunity to add it to its technology portfolio,” he explained in the post.
Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel founded WaveOne in 2016 with the idea that artificial intelligence would generate the necessary codecs to compress and decompress a video losing the minimum possible quality.
With current standard video compression and decompression algorithms, the compression is done by the content provider platform, for example, YouTube’s servers; while decompression is the responsibility of the end user.
WaveOne’s main innovation was to create a “content-aware” video compression and decompression algorithm. Leveraging artificial intelligence scene detection, the technology could “understand” a video frame, allowing it, for example, to render priority to faces to the detriment of other elements of a scene to save bandwidth when playing content.
Before creating the company, Bourdev was a founding member of Meta’s artificial intelligence research division. In addition, both he and Rippel worked on the Meta team responsible for content moderation, visual search, and feed sorting on Facebook.
The compression technology developed by WaveOne is also resistant to sudden interruptions in connectivity. In other words, it is able to make a “best guess” based on the bits it has available, so that when the bandwidth is suddenly restricted, the video does not freeze, but shows less detail.
The new algorithm generated by WaveOne is capable of reducing the size of video files by up to half, obtaining better results in quality and fluidity in the most complex scenes.
With this acquisition, Apple seeks to generate a more efficient streaming platform. Small improvements in video compression can save bandwidth costs or allow services like Apple TV to offer higher resolutions and frame rates.
