Beamr began in 2009 by the serial technologist Sharon Carmel who counts two previous startup exits to his credit which include a digital graphics and imaging technology company that rocketed to a $7 billion valuation on the London stock exchange, and a cloud synchronization company sold to Phoenix Technologies. Beamr serves the world's top Pay TV and OTT video service providers, the result of being a top developer of content-adaptive video encoding and content-adaptive video optimization solutions that enable high quality, high performance, and bitrate efficiency for managed service operators, OTT content platforms, broadcasters, and online video streaming platforms.
Beamr products are known for enabling as much as a 35% network reclamation by reducing video files as much as 50% with Beamr 4x and Beamr 5x H.264 and HEVC CABR enabled content-adaptive encoders. Beamr offers the best video quality at the lowest bitrate for telcos and TV networks and MSOs seeking to reduce video bandwidth utilization on the network backbone and edge.
The Beamr perceptual quality measure is based on a proprietary, low complexity, highly reliable, perceptually aligned quality metric that is covered by thirty-three patents. The existence of this special quality measure enables controlling a video encoder to obtain an output clip with maximal compression of the video input while maintaining the original video resolution, format and visual quality. CABR does this by controlling the compression level of each frame in the video sequence in such a way that it is compressed to the maximum while producing a visual result that is the same as the quality that was originally specified.
The Beamr quality measure has been in development since 2009. After extensive refinement, and subjecting it to the strict requirements and testing of ITU BT.500 which is an International standard for certifying image quality, we were able to confirm that there is a sufficiently high correlation of our quality measure with subjective results. The Beamr quality measure takes into account temporal artifacts. Since it is not sufficient to ensure only at the frame level that degradation has not been introduced - it is also necessary to preserve more info the quality of the video's temporal flow. When viewing a video encoded using the VBR rate-control and a video encoded with the CABR rate-control side-by-side, they will appear identical to the human eye under regular viewing conditions. This is a secret to how the process is able to guarantee image quality.
As the next step in the development of CABR, Beamr showcased at NAB 2019 silicon accelerated CABR by showing integration with the Intel Media SDK. Silicon accelerated CABR allows Beamr to move closer to the original vision of optimizing the network and bringing newfound bandwidth savings. The Beamr CABR SDK enables video engineers to utilize the efficiency of silicon encoders so that they can create massively scalable consumer device, cloud, and edge encoding solutions which balance encoder density and performance, with bitrate efficiency.