Beamr services the biggest Pay TV and online video service providers as the industry’s top developer of content-adaptive encoding and video optimization solutions that enable high video quality, excellent CPU performance, and excellent bitrate efficiency for MSOs, streaming content distributors, broadcasters and OVPs. Backed by forty-four International patents, Beamr's perceptual optimization technology has been integrated with our HEVC and H.264 video engines. CABR (Content-Adaptive Bitrate) is a ground breaking rate-control mode that enables guaranteed quality to be delivered with bitrate savings as high as 50%. Founded in 2009, Beamr investors include Verizon Ventures, Eric Schmidt backed Innovation Endeavors, and Disruptive.
The advanced imaging technology Beamr developed for our codecs are covered by 11 granted patents that are a part of the 44 total patents the company holds that cover our breakthrough 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 content distribution networks. With compute efficiency being an essential goal, video architects must be prepared for advanced entertainment content, by embracing new technologies, capabilities, and codecs such as HEVC, HDR, and 4K.
As a original inventor 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 perceptual quality measure to reduce bitrate. This is the basis for the Beamr rate-control called CABR which stands for Content-Adaptive Bitrate. CABR is the anchoring feature for the company's HEVC codec Beamr 5x and the H.264 encoder Beamr 4x. CABR is a Beamr proprietary invention that ensures the highest video quality at the lowest bit rate. By activating 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 beamr hevc 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 normal viewing conditions. This is a secret to how the process is able to guarantee image quality.
Continuing the rich legacy of innovation, Beamr demonstrated at NAB 2019 CABR accelerated with silicon by showing integration with the Intel Media SDK. Silicon accelerated CABR allows Beamr to take another step closer to our original vision of optimizing the network and bringing newfound bandwidth savings. The Beamr CABR SDK enables video engineers to utilize the efficiency of silicon encoders so that they can create massively scalable consumer device, cloud, and edge encoding solutions which balance encoder density and performance, with bitrate efficiency.