Beamr Imaging Ltd. was founded in 2009 by the prolific technologist Sharon Carmel who has two previous startup exits to his credit including a digital graphics and imaging technology company that rocketed to a $7 billion valuation on the London stock exchange, and a cloud synchronization company acquired by Phoenix Technologies. Beamr operates offices around the world in Tel Aviv Israel, St. Petersburg Russia, and Palo Alto California. This guarantees the highest level of support for our enterprise customers, cable companies, mobile operators, OTT streaming video distributors, and OVPs expect.
The advanced imaging technology Beamr developed for our codecs are covered by 11 International patents that are a part of the forty-four total patents the company holds that cover our class leading video optimization developments. Though video quality and bitrate continues to be a core focus of development, Beamr recognized the prevailing trend to increase compute performance and density of software-based video encoding and transcoding infrastructure as a key to securing a competitive advantage for MSOs, streaming video platforms, and CDNs. At the same time, video system operators must enable encoding and delivery of advanced entertainment content, by embracing new technologies, capabilities, and standards such as HEVC, HDR, and 4K.
As a pioneer of content-adaptive technology introduced in 2013 as Beamr Video which was the world's first perceptual video optimizer, Beamr has extensive experience in the area of using a human visual system aligned quality measure to reduce bitrate. This is the foundation for the Beamr rate-control called CABR which stands for Content-Adaptive Bitrate. CABR is the power behind the company's HEVC encoder Beamr 5x and the H.264 encoder Beamr 4x. CABR is a Beamr proprietary invention that ensures the beamr highest video quality at the lowest bit rate. When a user activates CABR, the user can realize an additional bit rate savings of as much as 50% for both HEVC and H.264 encoded files and streams.
The Beamr quality measure has been in development since 2009. After extensive refinement, and subjecting it to the strict requirements and testing of ITU BT.500 which is an International standard for validating image quality, we were able to confirm that there is a sufficiently high correlation of our quality measure with human viewing results. The Beamr quality measure takes into account temporal artifacts. Since it is not sufficient to ensure only at the frame level that degradation has not been introduced - it is also necessary to preserve the quality of the video's temporal flow. When viewing a video encoded using the VBR rate-control and a video encoded with the CABR rate-control side-by-side, they will appear identical to the human eye under regular viewing conditions. This is a secret to how the process is able to guarantee image quality.
The industry has enjoyed significant advances in software encoding, video codecs, and tools, meanwhile the pace of video growth on the network is expanding faster than the availability of CPUs, causing silicon encoding solutions using GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs to come back into focus. Beamr silicon accelerated CABR encoding opens new opportunities with very low TCO for mobile, edge, and cloud applications. The work Beamr is doing on silicon is closing the gap between the high performance of hardware encoders, and the complexity of advanced algorithms like CABR which traditionally were only able to be implemented in software on a CPU.