Verizon Ventures is investing $4 million into media optimization vendor Beamr.
With the capital influx, Verizon joins existing Beamr investors including Eric Schmidt's fund Innovation Endeavors, Marker LLC, and Disruptive. According to Beamr, Verizon Ventures' investment will help to “accelerate development of solutions that will feature the company's highly regarded and patented perceptual quality measure technology.”
Beamr's H.264 and H.265/HEVC video optimization technology and encoders are built for OTT streaming services, cable and satellite systems, and managed IP networks.
"Beamr's vision has always been to merge standards-based encoding technologies with the benefits of our perceptual quality measure, so the industry can meet the heightened consumer expectations for video quality while staying within network constraints," said Sharon Carmel, CEO and founder of Beamr, in a statement. "Our approach to bitrate reduction has attracted an industry-leading customer base where network capacities and media storage requirements are under pressure, but where exceptional video quality must be maintained."
RELATED: Beamr acquires Vanguard Video, boosting its OTT service portfolio
Earlier this year, Beamr acquired HEVC and H.264 software encoding company Vanguard Video and integrated the company’s solutions into Beamr Video, a cloud service that’s used by Netflix, Imagine Communications, Intel, Sony and Yahoo.
"The competitive nature of consumer video services today is forcing everyone to improve and we believe Beamr's perceptually driven optimization technology delivers benefits to the network and ultimately, the bottom line," said David Famolari, director at Verizon Ventures, in a statement. "Beamr significantly addresses the pain and costs of storing and delivering high bandwidth video content over increasingly congested networks, with no loss in visual quality. As more HD and ultra-HD content becomes available, Beamr's technology can be critical to delivering superior end-user quality of experience."
For Verizon, video optimization is of particular importance as the provider continues to push its mobile-centric Go90 video platform as well as negotiate the large volumes of wireless network traffic created by mobile video.