Sony is gearing up to significantly improve their video and cloud streaming service in the future, as they have announced an acquisition agreement with UK-based company iSize, which specializes in deep learning solutions for video delivery.
As outlined in the announcement on the SIE site, acquiring iSIZE will benefit SIE in a range of streaming services while cutting down on bitrate.
“We are thrilled to announce that Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC (“SIE”) has entered into an agreement to acquire iSIZE, a UK-based company specializing in deep learning for video delivery. iSIZE builds AI-powered solutions to deliver bitrate savings and quality improvements for the media and entertainment industry. The acquisition provides SIE with significant expertise in applying machine learning to video processing, which will benefit a range of our R&D efforts as well as our video and streaming services.
Founded in 2016 and based in London, iSIZE has a team of talented engineers and technical experts who have developed a suite of software solutions to optimize video. For example, the company built an AI-based perceptual preprocessing solution that allows conventional, third-party encoders to produce higher-quality video at a significantly lower bitrate.
We look forward to welcoming the iSIZE team to SIE.”
iSIZE currently has three available products, those being BitSave, BitClear, and BitGen, all of which offer bitrate reduction. What this all essentially means is that these types of solutions will lead to the better image quality of streamed content, including gaming over the cloud, without needing to use higher bandwidth. More data can be sent over a smaller bitrate, all thanks to AI and deep learning.
It’ll be interesting to see how Sony used this with PlayStation, though we suspect that’ll mostly center around Cloud gaming.
Source: Sony Interactive
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