Beamr Accelerates HEVC Adoption With New Transcoder

- TEL AVIV, Israel, April 4, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Building on nearly ten years of product development, Beamr Imaging Ltd. is pleased to announce Beamr Transcoder VOD, a product designed to activate and accelerate video distributors looking for reliable HEVC and H.264 streaming to HLS compatible devices. With more than five years of commercial development, and 1.5 billion devices supporting hardware-accelerated HEVC decoding, video engineers will cheer the inclusion of Unified Streaming's Unified Packager to enable fMP4 and HLS as a delivery format for HEVC, while DRM systems that include the Apple-supported third edition of the Common Encryption scheme 'cbcs' are fully supported. Beamr Transcoder VOD addresses the video distributor's quest to reduce network traffic using HEVC by offering easy workflow integration and unrivaled encoding speed and density. Built for the future, Beamr Transcoder VOD offers the lowest total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) in the market when operated on Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. Answering the industry's call to move off monolithic black boxes, the heart of this highly efficient transcoder was developed in native C++ to run on Linux while being fully scalable across private, hybrid, and public clouds such as AWS using Docker containers. Beamr Transcoder VOD automatically allocates the optimum number of threads to the video encoding function while reserving the minimum required for decoding, pipeline management, and network control. "Delivering high video quality and superior user experience is an important business and technical objective for all video services. Consumers are aware of the quality of the display they carry in their pockets and no longer are willing to compromise," commented Beamr President Eli Lubitch. "Our codec SDK customers serve more than 100 million subscribers around the world using Beamr's world-class encoding solutions, and we built the Beamr Transcoder VOD as a way to enable everyone, regardless of engineering capacity, to benefit from adopting Beamr's superior encoding technology." Cisco's Visual Networking Index reveals by 2021 that 82 percent of all traffic on the Internet will be video. As a result, video distributors must implement methods to reduce the bitrate of the video they deliver without compromising quality. Beamr's pioneering perceptually-driven optimization process addresses the need for smaller file and stream sizes while offering guaranteed quality and unmatched speed. Commercialized in the Beamr 5x HEVC codec SDK that is included with Beamr Transcoder VOD, the combined bitrate savings of HEVC, and the Beamr 5x content-adaptive rate-control (CABR), yields bitrate savings as high as 65% or more when compared to H.264, and 30% savings when compared to the HEVC VBR rate-control. "It is a core company philosophy to provide the highest quality solutions at the best value. When we surveyed the market, it was clear that the old model of requiring customers to jump through hoops for an evaluation, does not work today," stated Sharon Carmel, Beamr founder and CEO. "I am very proud of the technical achievement our team delivered with Beamr Transcoder VOD, and I want everyone to experience it. But I am equally proud of the business model we developed that will enable anyone who wants to use this amazing product, to click, download, encode, and put the file into production. We call if free to start." Beamr Transcoder VOD is available in a FREE and PAID version, and both include the Beamr 4, Beamr 5, and Beamr 5x codec SDKs for H.264 and HEVC transcoding. The FREE version ships in May 2018 and will include a monthly credit for free HEVC and H.264 transcoding. For users requiring more transcoding time, ProRes file support, advanced Dolby audio codecs, or dynamic ad insertion features, a PAID version will be available shortly following the FREE version. In addition, Beamr Transcoder comes with a committed product roadmap that includes a live version scheduled for Q4 2018. Video executives and engineers are encouraged to see Beamr Transcoder VOD in action and meet with the design and engineering team in Las VegasApril 9th to April 12th at the NAB show in Beamr's booth #SU9813. For information visit beamr.com/transcoder-vod/ About Beamr Beamr is the leading designer and developer of content-adaptive encoding and optimization solutions that enable high quality, performance, and new levels of bitrate efficiency for MSOs, OTT content distributors, broadcasters and video streaming platforms. The company has 36 patents granted and more than 20 pending. By expanding into full solutions Beamr Transcoder enables Beamr HEVC and H.264 codec SDKs to become complete encoding solutions. Founded in 2009, Beamr investors include Verizon Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, and Disruptive. Beamr operates offices in London, Tel Aviv, St. Petersburg Russia, and Palo Alto.