Guido Meardi – CEO and Co-Founder of V-Nova International Ltd. at IBC.
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New solutions showcased at IBC, technological premieres, the key advantages of your products and the latest prominent projects, plans for future and the major new and emerging trends you see at the broadcast and proAV industry.
Here at IBC we have a very big showcase for MPEG-5 LCEVC – the new MPEG standard to enhance video encoding of any codecs.
LCEVC is extremely important.It was published at the end of 2021 so it’s actually brand new, but it’s already being adopted across the planet.
LCEVC is a standard that allows to compress video much better in terms of bitrate andpower usage. We care a lot about sustainability and energy costs nowadays.
Transcoding of videos is not just a problem in terms of delivering better quality video for the audience, but it’s also sometimes a problem in terms of power usage. With LCEVC you are able to deliver better quality to the audience spending less in terms of transmission and power costs.
Here we are showcasing how LCEVC can be rapidly adopted in a number of use-cases. We are showing delivery to mobile devices for use-cases such as internet-video, OTT, video-conferencingand real-time communication.
We’re also showing how it can serve larger screen delivery.Set-top boxes or TV’s can be easily upgraded by our software or can use already developed chipsets, allowing a very fast adoption of the technology.
We’re also showing how LCEVC can power up the metaverseby delivering ultra-low latency video with very good quality and bitrate which is compatible with wireless networks like 5G or Wi-fi. That’s the future of XR and specifically the possibility to render high-quality and high-resolution volumetric imaging in the cloud.
2. Are you implementing AI in your solutions, how AI will be shaping the future of industry?
Of course. V-Nova is a deep tech company that applied massive parallel processing and AI to data compression in novel ways. So essentially, we redefined the way to compress and encode data to leverage approaches that were typically used for graphics like 3d rendering or for artificial intelligence.
We were the first company to create codecs that use AI in loop. In particular, our codec vs6 is first and only so far codec that uses convolutional neuron networks in loop.
Also, MPEG5 LCEVC uses approaches that use AI in rate control. It also has the possibility to embed in-loop super-resolution with AI.
In generally we make a lot use of AI and our technologies are particularly suited to make good use of AI.
We also demonstrated how our technologies applied to media indexing can speed up the recognition of faces or imaging etc. from 3x to 5x by also increasing the accuracy by roughly 7% which is a pretty considerable amount.
3. Are you planning to work with CIS broadcast market?
So far, we’ve been mostly working with South-American, European and Chinese companies, so we’ve been less active in the CIS market for technical reasons – we are still relatively small as a team, and at the beginning ofadoption of the standard it’s very important to have the biggest global players adopt it first. So of course, we gave privilege to companies like Meta, Amazon, Global TV etc. to be able to move the ecosystem forward.
In Europe and CIS in general there are fewer of these largecompanies, so for now we have been less active, but of course, it’s also a very important market.
Now that we have the right partners which are active in CIS, it’s going to be simpler to work in the CIS market. Because when their solutions are enabled with LCEVC, it should be much easier for customers in the CIS region to be able to benefit from LCEVC.
4. Which country from CIS is more important for your company?
Everybody is important for us. We really want our technology to be as useful as possible. That’s why we have designed a license model that is extremely inexpensive and designed for mass adoption.
What we are betting on is adoption from mid-size players across the planet. Its not a model made just for Google and Netflix, but for everyone.
Whoever wants to be an innovator is important. It’s not the matter of the country or the company.That’s why we work with customers from different regions.
