Apple has acquired a company called WaveOne, which develops AI algorithms to compress videos. Although Apple didn't confirm the sale, former employees of WaveOne have stated that they are now working in various machine-learning groups at Apple. WaveOne's founders, Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel, had previously worked on AI research at Facebook.
WaveOne's key innovation was a 'content-aware' video compression and decompression algorithm that could run on AI accelerators built into many mobile phones and a growing number of PCs.
WaveOne also claimed that its video compression technology is robust against sudden disconnections and that its hardware-agnostic approach could cut video file sizes by up to half, resulting in better effects in more complex scenes.
Ahead of the Apple acquisition, WaveOne received $9 million from backers including Khosla Ventures, Vela Partners, Incubate Fund, Omega Venture Partners, and Blue Ivy.
So what does Apple want from AI-powered video codecs?
The obvious answer is more efficient streaming. Even minor improvements in video compression can save bandwidth costs or enable services like Apple TV+ to deliver higher resolutions and frame rates, depending on the type of content being streamed.
Perhaps there will be similar innovations from Apple's WaveOne team in the near future.
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