Apple has almost made it official that it has acquired WaveOne, a company that uses artificial intelligence technology to compress videos. However, the tech company has not yet released a press statement on the matter. Nonetheless, one of WaveOne’s former employees has hinted at the acquisition on his profile, revealing that the iPhone giant is now the parent company of the Mountain View startup.
Sources familiar with the matter reported to our Cybersecurity Insiders that the company was purchased by the iOS giant in January of this year. Apple will be adding WaveOne’s technology, which operates with machine learning, to its deep learning video tech. This may be introduced by the end of this year.
Generally, most video compression occurs at the content provider’s side, while decompression takes place on the end-user’s device. However, new codecs require new hardware for processing compression and decompression. WaveOne has developed a “content-aware” video compression and decompression algorithm that operates on AI accelerators, which are now built into numerous PCs and mobile phones.
By leveraging the power of AI, the device can understand a video frame and differentiate between scenes and objects. It can then prioritize faces, for example, to save bandwidth, acting as a savior in cases of abrupt connectivity disruptions, usually seen in 3G and 4G connections, but not in 5G.
In December 2022, WaveOne released a demo video claiming that the innovation is hardware-agnostic, as it can reduce video file size by a fraction, making it useful in processing complex scenes such as 4K with ease.
