We’ve known Beamr as an optimization company, and in 2016 they bought Vanguard Video, a codec company. Traditionally, Beamr sold SDKs to large customers, but now they’re launching a cloud transcoding service. I recently interviewed CTO Dror Gill about the new service; here’s the video.

The graph below shows two off-the-shelf players retrieving the same HLS manifest under the similar test conditions, which vary from 512 kbps at the low end to 5120 kbps at the top end. On the left, Player A, stopped retrieving video multiple times during the low bandwidth transmissions, stalling playback, which are the red lines at the bottom of the …

As recently as June, HEVC seemed to have more momentum than the Golden State Warriors and New England Patriots combined, courtesy of Apple’s adding HEVC to HLS. Then, in the span of 30 days in January, the balloon popped as a trio of seismically negative events cast a dark shadow on HEVC’s future relevance and potential financial success. Et Tu, …