WaveOne, a Mountain View-based business working on AI video compression methods, has been quietly bought by Apple.
When contacted for comment, the company declined to confirm the sale. However, WaveOne’s website was taken down in January, and numerous former staff members, including one of WaveOne’s co-founders, are now employed by different machine learning teams inside Apple.
Bob Stankosh, who was WaveOne’s previous head of sales and business development. He revealed the sale in a LinkedIn post from a month ago.
We completed the sale of WaveOne, last week after almost two years at the company, according to Stankosh. “We began our adventure at WaveOne. When we realised that deep learning video technology and machine learning may potentially transform the world. Apple seized the chance to expand their technological offerings when they recognised this possibility.
Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel established WaveOne in 2016 with the goal of transforming the antiquated paradigm of video codecs into an AI-powered system. Bourdev was a founding member of Meta’s AI research division before joining the company. And he and Rippel both worked on the Meta computer vision team, which was in charge of Facebook’s content moderation, visual search, and feed ranking.
When it comes to common video compression and decompression methods, the compression takes place on the servers of the content provider (like YouTube). While the decompression is handled by the computers of the end users. Although it’s a good strategy, advancements are difficult to spread. Since new codecs need technology designed to speed up compression or decompression.
The key advancement made by WaveOne was a “content-aware”. Video compression and decompression technique that could be utilised by Computers, smartphones, and an increasing number of tablets with AI accelerators. The startup’s technology could essentially “understand” a video frame by utilising AI-powered scene and object detection. Which allowed it to, for example, prioritise faces over other scene features in order to conserve data.
WaveOne asserted that its method, which was independent of technology, could cut the size of video files in half. With larger improvements in more complicated scenarios.
Evidently, investors recognised the potential. Previous to the acquisition, WaveOne attracted $9 million from backers including Khosla Ventures, Vela Partners. And also Incubate Fund, Omega Venture Partners and Blue Ivy.
What then could the company hope to achieve with an AI-powered video codec? Clearly, more effective streaming is the obvious solution. Depending on the sort of streaming content being used, even slight advancements in video compression could reduce bandwidth costs to deliver greater resolutions and framerates.
YouTube already carries out this. YouTube’s data requirements dropped by 4% as a result of Alphabet’s DeepMind’s adaptation of a machine learning algorithm. Originally created to play board games to the challenge of compressing YouTube videos.
Hopefully the WaveOne team, owned by Apple, will soon produce advancements similar to these.
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