The post Announcing 84% Speedup in the Latest Release of Comprimato HTJ2K appeared first on Comprimato.
]]>The new version of the SDK, particularly noted for its enhancements in HTJ2K encoding, brings significant increase in efficiency while promises continuous innovation in the future.
Key Highlights of the 2.8.3 Release:
This update underscores Comprimato’s focus on providing efficient, high-performance JPEG2000 encoding solutions. The enhancements in the latest SDK release directly address evolving image processing needs, aiming to optimize encoding speeds and reduce operational costs.
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]]>The post Asking the CEO #4: How do you conduct business in Hollywood from Brno, Czech Republic? appeared first on Comprimato.
]]>Yes, with the JPEG2000 codec, we were aiming for the American market. Securing our first European and Czech client took many years. Today, 70% of our revenue is still from North America.
Our initial investment was 200,000 EUR, a substantial sum that facilitated our introduction to North America. I dedicated a significant portion of my time traveling to and from the States. Though it disrupted my sleep schedule, it enabled us to establish crucial connections. This presence allowed us to gain a foothold in the entertainment industry, where, as I’ve noted before, such relationships are vital.
While initiating conversations isn’t too challenging, as Americans are receptive to exploring new market solutions and envisioning innovative ideas, cold calling can be particularly tough. It’s beneficial to have a referral or someone to vouch for you. Our strategy involved attending fairs and trade shows, which made networking considerably easier. Once we forged personal connections, the process became smoother.
However, when it comes to the duration from product introduction to securing an order, it varies. The entertainment industry operates at a deliberate pace with long-term plans and budgets. Thus, finalizing a deal might stretch over two years. Yet, if memory serves, our first deal materialized in less than six months. For larger agreements, patience is essential.
It is not as inaccessible as it may seem. There is a time difference, but people are willing to hear what’s new. That’s also why business is so far advanced there. They are open to new technologies and solutions, trust and buy from small businesses more, and are not afraid of them. The technological level is generally a bit further; even in adapting novelties, they are ahead of Europe in this regard.
Nonetheless, without personal interaction, it is difficult there, and it is definitely easier for us to drive to see a client in Germany than to fly to New York or Los Angeles.
As long as the payments come in, I’m fond of all our partners! But, to delve deeper, we’ve got a joint product with the renowned firm, AJA. They’re giants in the video equipment domain, having been in the market for three decades. Anyone in the industry either knows them or has at least used their gear. This joint product, built by Comprimato, is sold through their well-established channels.
The collaboration started like this: I got to know their business and what they needed. I approached them and said, “Hey, this is something you’ve got to have.” It took a bit of convincing, but they saw the potential. Today, it’s a stellar product, with its sales figures doubling every year. I am grateful for the partnership.
Read the previous part of the series “Asking the CEO #1 & #2 & #3.
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]]>The post Asking the CEO #3: What does venture capital investment mean for the business? appeared first on Comprimato.
]]>I truly don’t know. Looking back, if I were in their position, I might hesitate to invest (big smile). We had cutting-edge technology, passion, and enthusiasm. We also believed we were nearing the completion of our product and had a good understanding of the market. Sadly, we were mistaken on those last two counts. It took us significant effort to figure out how to structure the business around our technology. It was a major learning experience for all of us.
Still, the investment from both partners brought not only funds but also a wealth of knowledge and connections.
A lot depends on the case and the investors. We were lucky with our investors. They supported us through highs and lows, with a steady demeanor. This is not the case for every investor.
What did it give us? The first investment was 200,000 EUR, which was a decent capital and allowed us to present ourselves in North America. I found myself jetting off to the USA quite often, sometimes even ten times in a year, resulting in endless jetlag. However, thanks to this, we have built many relationships that are not accessible in our field to people from the outside.
The entertainment business is a lot about personal connections; many people have been working in the industry for twenty years or more, and it is not easily possible to gain their trust in a new company. This is very difficult to do through emails and PPC campaigns. So, the money from the investors helped us build these relationships.
For big deals, it’s a long shot. Winning ESPN took years. We met with one of their important people in San José, and he explained that what we have is quite unique and that we could replace the hardware we are buying today. It took us about a year to deliver the first product to them.
So actually, it was quite fast; the guy was quite an adventurer who wasn’t afraid to invest in a product from a small Czech company. This became our second product, which at the same time, ended up being the actual end product. We moved from Hollywood to live video production.
Comprimato has experienced a significant period of self-reflection and change. At the start, we did receive a good amount of money from our investors. However, we made several missteps. We weren’t familiar with the market, and our product wasn’t even ready. Our revenue grew at a commendable rate, but it was during a period when the company’s expenses were double that growth.
This financial situation nearly brought the company to its knees. With only enough funds for one more month, the cancellation of even a single client order could have been the end for Comprimato. We were somewhat lost, our workforce reducing from 25 employees down to 10. The original technology, the foundation of our company, had stagnated, leaving little room for further growth.
Yet, around four years ago, we began seeking new strategies and targeting new clients. As a result, the company started seeing growth rates of 20-30% annually. Another evolution for us has been our shift towards the Cloud. While many industries have already moved to the Cloud, the video enterprise sector has been a bit slower but is now actively beginning to embrace it.
The “Asking the CEO” series will continue soon.
Read the previous part of the series “Asking the CEO #1 & #2
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]]>The post Asking the CEO #2: Teleconference as a bridge to the new company appeared first on Comprimato.
]]>Yes, I studied at the Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University and started my second year working in the Laboratory of Advanced Network Technologies, which was an interesting topic for me. I joined a group led by Petr Holub, one of the Comprimato founders, and he dealt with the issue of video transmissions in high quality in real-time.
Back then, it was a novelty; today Zoom and Teams offer such services. In 2005, we made teleconferences in full HD quality with minimal time latency. But they were uncompressed, which could be done in an academic environment thanks to a very good internet connection. But we wanted to break out of the academic environment; we discovered that the commercial sphere is far from having such a good internet connection. For instance, we aimed to utilize our uncompressed video streaming technology for remote consulting during a surgical procedure at the Hradec Králové hospital. Although we required a 10-gigabit internet connection for the consultation, we discovered that the entire hospital’s capacity was limited to just 1 gigabit.
And that’s when we started thinking about how to compress the image, to make it of high quality, and how to make this software solution available to customers sensibly.
At the beginning of my master’s degree, I was given a task to solve how to implement an already existing compression JPEG2000 mechanism and accelerate it with graphics cards. They use graphics cards today, for example, for artificial intelligence or hydrometeorological models, but it was a revolutionary innovation at that time. So, I had to understand the working of graphics cards and video compression, which I knew nothing about at that point.
Well, it was also completely unplanned. For example, my father encouraged me to work for IBM rather than start my own company. However, the company was founded only in the second or the third year of my Ph.D. Studies when I developed a very similar topic. With my co-founder Martin Jirman, we brought our algorithms to a very good and fast solution.
We achieved what many deemed impossible: offering real-time compression through a software solution and facilitating 4K transmissions during an era when 4K was scarcely recognized. Many were skeptical that such feats could be accomplished using graphics cards. Armed with our portable “showroom”, we showcased our technology internationally and garnered overwhelmingly positive feedback. This reception propelled us to venture into the commercial domain.
We started the company with excellent algorithms, but it was not a product, and the first version of the product, including the API and documentation, was ready in half a year. However, we still only had the technology; we just licensed the library to other SW companies who built their own products on it.
The way I see it today is that we should have headed straight for our own end product that we could have sold to end-users. The whole thing was a huge adventure, I knew nothing about business, much less international business, but our first serious order happened roughly three to four months after the company was founded, and it was an order worth a million crowns. That was a great starting push.
The “Asking the CEO” series (#3) will continue soon.
Read the previous part of the series, “Asking the CEO #1″.
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]]>The post Asking the CEO #1: Without video compression, internet streaming would not be possible appeared first on Comprimato.
]]>Interview with Jiri Matela, Co-founder of Comprimato:
Jiri Matela: It would be difficult. Video streaming would not be possible. Over 80% of internet traffic is compressed video. Storing digital data is brilliantly simple – we need two characters: zero and number one – and we can encode anything into them. Then again, it is very limiting. When we compare it to the alphabet and take the letter A, it is just one character, but we write this letter using binary representation, we would need anything from eight to thirty-two zeros and ones.
In the case of image and video, the problem is several orders of magnitude higher because there is an incredible amount of data needed to represent one image.
And right here is the motivation for compression, how to make the recording and transmission of this data more efficient and denser. At the same time, there is a large amount of entropy: the 32 letters of the alphabet allow us many more combinations than ones and zeroes, plus, letters are also much easier to compress.
Image compression is also leveraging a psycho-visual tricks when the human eye cannot see all the bits represented by pixels, so there are many redundant elements. The next level is video – if we consider that we have fifty frames a second in the video, close to all the frames are almost the same. Motion is created by playing individual frames one after the other. And video compression uses just that minimal changes between frames, so much data is discarded by the compression algorithm and then reconstructed again based on similarity.
We do video compression, streaming software, and software as a service. When you think of Netflix, you probably think of movies, but there is a rather complex, sophisticated back-end behind it, a video processing infrastructure, and that’s what Comprimato does. Specifically, we specialize in live broadcast – for sports events, large video conferences, or in the USA for church services; for example, these are very common there now.
We’ve developed incredibly fast software that serves as a flexible alternative to specialized hardware designed for specific tasks. With equivalent quality and parameters, our software not only reduces costs but also enhances the density, allowing customers to process more video streams simultaneously.
Yes, right. I don’t know if they’re thinking about us while watching football, though
The “Asking the CEO” series will continue soon.
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]]>The post Comprimato’s live framerate conversion as a service appeared first on Comprimato.
]]>Traditionally there was a choice when it came to framerate conversion. There are low-cost solutions, and software packages if you are not worried about realtime conversion. But the results tend to be jerky, blurry, ghosted and generally poor quality.
Sport is really challenging for framerate conversion. There is a lot of action, the camera tends to move quickly, and for many sports the focus of attention is on a ball moving rapidly through the field of vision. Lose the ball and you can give up on the whole broadcast.
The solution lies in motion compensated framerate conversion. This analyses the movement in the sequence, and determines where each moving object should be at the precise time point at which the new frame needs to be synthesised.
This calls for a lot of processing: all the motion must be estimated, then the new positions calculated for the new frame. In sport, where objects and athletes are moving in different directions, and crossing paths, all while the camera is moving, that is a lot of calculation.
As always, you get what you pay for, but in framerate conversion, broadcast quality came at the cost of $100k+ hardware boxes. Given that broadcast engineers will always want a main and backup for resilience, that is close to a quarter of a million dollars.
The good news is that Comprimato has a software solution which provides excellent motion compensated realtime framerate conversion. The software solution runs on standard hardware and can be spun up in the cloud.
That means we can offer it as software-as-a-service (SaaS). In essence, you tell us you want live high quality framerate conversion, and we give you SRT input and output addresses. We charge for the time we are processing your signals. Instead of a capital expenditure close to a quarter of a million, your bill will be in hundreds of dollars.
But there is more, in terms of cost savings, convenience and quality. The chances are that you will be sending the content around the world as an IP stream, using a format like MPEG or JPEG-XS. You will probably need to transcode along the way.
The SaaS solution wraps encoding and transcoding along with framerate conversion. Setting up a delivery path simply means defining the input and output parameters. All the processing happens in the cloud, as a single transaction. You can set up signal and processing paths quickly and easily, so you really do only have to pay for the service when it is on air.
The final important point is that Comprimato has built its reputation on providing the highest video quality with minimal latency. Adding framerate conversion into the processing does not change that goal. Image quality will be maintained.
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]]>The post Comprimato has joined the DPP appeared first on Comprimato.
]]>As an independent body with a global reach, what makes the DPP stand out is that it is not a trade body advocating for vendors, nor a set of users looking to set unachievable standards. It is an open, honest, collaborative body where people can get together and talk things through.
It provides us a real opportunity to be in the same room with people who have completely different roles in the industry, and see if together we can find a solution that benefits us all.
Our strength at Comprimato is in signal processing, and particularly in developing very advanced algorithms that do compression and transcoding better and faster than anyone else. But that is only of value as part of a workflow that delivers practical results for an end user.
That means we are always collaborating, always working with partners, supplying our specialist knowledge alongside multiple other vendors. To do that successfully, we have to understand our place in the infrastructure, other partners have to understand what we can do, and customers have to appreciate the full transformative potential of software-defined architectures.
The best way to achieve that is if we all understand each other, and have a common, standardised, agreed framework – which we know will work – against which we all supply. We see the DPP as a cross-industry forum where we can have those conversations, set those frameworks, and collate the information which will help us all advance.
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]]>The post Comprimato at VidTrans 2023 appeared first on Comprimato.
]]>During the exhibition we will be highlighting our software-based solutions for professional live video encoding, transcoding, and remote production in cloud. On our booth we’ll be showcasing a new Frame rate conversion feature now included with our Live Transcoder.
We will also have BRIDGE LIVE on our booth. This powerful solution fuses AJA I/O technology with Comprimato Software to deliver high-performance multi-channel HD and single-channel UltraHD encoding / decoding / transcoding.
As part of the acclaimed technical conference programme, Jiri Matela, Comprimato CEO and Co-Founder, will be presenting “JPEG-XS and NDI for Low Latency Cloud Production: A Technology Preview” on February 28, 2023.
The presentation will showcase a cutting-edge technology preview of a cloud-based solution for live video transport and remote production that utilizes JPEG-XS TR-07 for ground to cloud transport and NDI format on the edge of the cloud. The solution is able to achieve very low latency. We will discuss the technical details of the solution, including the benefits and challenges of using JPEG-XS TR-07 and NDI for live video transport and remote production. Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of the latest advancements in this field and how they can be applied to their own work. This technology preview will be of interest to end users, service providers, equipment manufacturers, and others involved with the world of television and video.
To schedule a meeting with us during the show or to learn more please contact us.
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]]>The post Comprimato’s Jiří Matela on Powering Live Sports Production with GPU’s appeared first on Comprimato.
]]>Jiri Matela discussed the potential of GPUs for encoding live video streams. GPUs are ideal for this due to their ability to handle large amounts of data with minimal latency. Additionally, GPUs can be used to compress video streams with much higher density than traditional methods, making them an ideal solution for live encoding of UHD 4K and beyond.
Jiri Matela also believes that GPU-accelerated image processing and video compression will become the standard in broadcast production. The technology has the potential to make UHD sports production and streaming more accessible and cost-effective than ever before.
To learn more about Comprimato’s work on live production and GPU-accelerated video compression, watch the full interview:
See the original post at SVG’s site.
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]]>The post Meet us at SVG Summit 2022 appeared first on Comprimato.
]]>Book your Meeting now to:
Before the show, you can read about Live Transcoder’s latest features or try its user interface.
We look forward to seeing you at SVG Summit 2022
Do you have questions?
Check out our Live Transcoder’s specifications or contact us.
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