Apple has acquired WaveOne, a start-up that has been developing artificial intelligence algorithms for video compression.
The company hasn’t officially announced the acquisition, but WaveOne’s former head of sales and business development, Bob Stankosh, revealed the news on LinkedIn.
“After almost two years at WaveOne, last week we finalised the sale of the company to Apple,” he write. “We started our journey at WaveOne, realising that machine learning and deep learning video technology could potentially change the world. Apple saw this potential and took the opportunity to add it to their technology portfolio.”
WaveOne created artificial intelligence-based video compression software that could devote limited bandwidth to vital on-screen elements like faces, while minimising resources to backdrop elements that are less of a focus.
Even minor improvements in bandwidth efficiency can have a significant impact on how much a streamer spends to compress and deliver video, as well as improving the end-user experience.
Google is already using a machine learning algorithm to compress YouTube videos, resulting in a four per cent reduction in the amount of data the company needs to stream video.
