V-Nova is buying the full global patent portfolio of video imaging firm Faroudja Enterprises.
The companies did not disclose the cost of the deal.
V-Nova said the addition of the Faroudja technology will further improve the efficiency of V-Nova's compression technology Perseus, according to a news release.
“New, disruptive technologies such as Ultra-HD TV, 360 video, VR immersive video and high quality video transmission on any network can all significantly benefit from solutions that reduce the bandwidth requirements in a cost-effective and scalable way. By acquiring the highly complementary patents of Faroudja Enterprises’ ground-breaking solutions, we are enhancing our ability to achieve this even further," said Guido Meardi, V-Nova CEO and co-founder, in a statement.
The patents cover Faroudja’s pre-processor and post-processor. The system V-Nova is acquiring also includes multidimensional video processing as well as the use of a support layer in parallel with the conventional compression path. The Faroudja scheme complements compression standards such as MPEG-2, h.264, HEVC and Perseus.
"Faroudja’s technology has already been demonstrated to provide a bitrate reduction of 35-50% over an existing compression technique. A tighter integration with V-Nova’s Perseus will leverage the codec’s own bitrate reduction performance to provide even greater benefits,” Meardi said.
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V-Nova’s Perseus data compression product stands to benefit as online video availability expands and demands for compression to alleviate demand on mobile networks increases.
"Our patent portfolio has been developed through years of experience in award-winning image processing and video compression. We are pleased that our innovation and hard work in developing industry-leading patents will now contribute to V-Nova’s wider global strategy to enable operators and service providers to connect more people with high quality content, even when challenged by bandwidth constraints,” said Yves Faroudja, president of Faroudja Enterprises, in a statement.
Meardi told FierceOnlineVideo at last year’s IBC that wireless carriers in particular see a lot of value in Perseus.
“This is massive because it means that an operator can start deploying it immediately to the devices that need it the most," he said. With mobile, "it’s the more constrained part of the transmission. It matters to the user because they’re paying for the data. It matters to the provider because they’re saving on encoding, storage and time."