Apple may have completed a new acquisition, coincidentally linked to the important segment of artificial intelligence, where by now every big tech is trying to intensify its presence, for what has already been baptized as the most important year for technologies related to AI.
This time the chatbots have nothing to do with it but the acquisition concerns the startup WaveOne, specialized in video compression AI algorithms. There are no confirmations at the moment but it is as if the deal has been concluded, given that many signs tell us that the operation has been completed. Meanwhile, many have noted that the WaveOne website was shut down in January and several former employees, including one of WaveOne’s co-founders, now work within Apple’s various machine learning groups. On the one hand Apple is silent, on the other the founder of the startup, Bob Stankosh, announced the sale with a post on LikedIn about a month ago.
“After nearly two years at WaveOne, we finalized the sale of the company to Apple last week. We began our WaveOne journey realizing that machine learning/deep learning video technology has the potential to change the world. Apple saw this potential and has taken the opportunity to add it to their technology portfolio.”
It must be said that Apple has repeatedly recalled that it does not want to make proclamations for every small acquisition it completes, since these are part of the company’s growth process.
What contribution will WaveOne bring to Apple? This small startup was founded in 2016 by Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel, who decided to take the video codec paradigm and try to base it on artificial intelligence.
When it comes to video compression and decompression algorithms, the former happens on the server side while the end user machines handle the decompression. It’s an effective approach, but the new codecs require new hardware specifically built to speed up compression or decompression, which actually slows down the introduction of algorithm improvements.
WaveOne has succeeded in creating a video compression and decompression algorithm based on what we could describe as ‘more aware’ content type and which can run on the AI ​​accelerators built into many phones and a growing number of PCs. Leveraging AI-based scene and object detection, the startup’s tech could essentially “understand” a video frameallowing you, for example, to prioritize faces over other elements within a scene to save bandwidth. Among the advantages of this technology there would also be the ability to carry on despite a sudden loss of connectivityonly limiting the details for the duration of the event.
WaveOne’s approach has caught the attention of tech bigs because it could decrease future video file size by up to 50%regardless of the hardware used. And so that even before Apple’s interest, WaveOne had managed to get something like 9 million dollars in funding.
Why is Apple interested in this technology? The Cupertino-based company could save on the bandwidth needed to deliver streaming content at high resolutions and framerates, making streaming much more efficient.
