Beamr Imaging Ltd. started in 2009 by the 3-time entrepreneur 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 serves the world's top Pay TV and OTT video service providers, the result of being a leading designer of content-adaptive video encoding and content-adaptive video optimization solutions that power high quality, high performance, and bitrate efficiency for MSOs, streaming video platforms, telcos, and video streaming platforms.
The advanced imaging technology Beamr developed for our codecs are covered by eleven 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 OTT services, streaming video distributors, and content distribution networks. With compute efficiency being an essential goal, 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 original inventor of content-adaptive technology introduced in 2013 as Beamr Video which was the world's first perceptual video optimizer, Beamr is well versed in the area of using a perceptually 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 codec Beamr 5x and the H.264 video encoder Beamr 4x. CABR is the most effective way to ensure the highest video quality at the lowest bit rate. By activating CABR, the user can realize an additional bit check here 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 years of refinement, and subjecting it to the strict requirements and testing of ITU BT.500 which is an International standard for testing image quality, we were able to confirm that there is a sufficiently high correlation of our quality measure with subjective 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. If you view 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.
As the next step in the development of CABR, Beamr showcased 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.