CEO David Stubenvoll says the investment from Clearhaven Partners will let Wowza accelerate innovation and growth, and possibly even open new offices, without the restrictions and hassle of being a listed company.
What Is H.264?
This is an installment in our ongoing series of What Is.? articles, designed to offer definitions, history, and context around significant terms and issues in the online video industry.
Executive Summary
H.264 is the most widely used codec on the planet, with significant penetration in optical disc, broadcast, and streaming video markets. However, many uses of H.264 are subject to royalties, something that should be considered prior to its adaption. Other factors to consider include comparative quality against other available technologies, like Google’s WebM, as well as the general availability of decoding capabilities on target platforms and devices. This article discusses H.264 and competitive technologies from these perspectives.
This article is part of Streaming Media s What Is series.
Executive Summary
Streaming media production starts with the infinite real world as captured by the lenses of our camcorders, and ends with the tightly compressed files necessary for streaming delivery. Along the way, the video is digitized, encoded, re-encoded, and frequently transcoded, with possible stops along the way for transrating, transsizing, and transmuxing.
These are terms we use every day, but few, if any, have precise definitions. Until now. Read on for our attempt to bring clarity to the lexicon of streaming media workflows and processes as we follow the life of a video from capture to consumption (on multiple platforms, of course).
Bitmovin Raises $25 Million in Series C Financing
Bitmovin, a leading provider of video infrastructure for global digital media companies, today announced it has raised $25 million in Series C financing. The company will leverage this investment to drive the continued expansion of its product innovation and technology leadership in the streaming space. Bitmovin s Series C round was led by Swisscom Ventures with participation from Climb Ventures, and existing investors: Atomico, Highland Europe and Constantia New Business. The announcement brings Bitmovin’s total funding to $68 million. The online video streaming market has grown exponentially at least 10x since we started Bitmovin in 2013, said Stefan Lederer, CEO and founder at Bitmovin. More consumers than ever prefer to watch content on any device and at any time rather than in linear programming. This trend is further fueled by advances in connectivity and consumer electronics, along with innovation i
New Rules of Codec Development
It took about 10 years to launch both H.264 and HEVC, so MPEG s much more ambitious launch of VVC, EVC, and LCEVC in 2020 and 2021 makes you wonder about its chances for success. Not only does it have to effectively differentiate each codec against the other, it also has to create compelling business cases against the Alliance for Open Media s (AOMedia) AV1 and existing MPEG codecs like HEVC and even H.264, which is still going strong. Recent developments have resulted in what I am calling the new rules of codec deployment, and they will complicate the success of any standards-based codecs.