A 2018 wish…

by Fabio Murra

Happy New Year my friends, family and colleagues. I really do hope 2018 will bring you all the good fortunes you’re wishing for! I also hope it will bring us the chance to see each other and work together more…

2017 has been a busy one. If it weren’t for the constant reminders to sign birthday cards, I’d find it difficult to believe a year has gone by so quickly. Then again, I look at all that’s happened. In tech & entertainment, a lot. Almost every second person I see on the train on the way to work these days has a smartwatch, Disney took a massive bite at Fox, and (dear to me) compression remains a hot topic – whether you watched the 4th series of Silicon Valley or not.

For me, and all of us at V-Nova, 2017 has been quite extraordinary. Actually, the effect is worse than those birthday cards. It feels like we’ve been through a few years in the last 12 months. We started by acquiring the patent portfolio of Faroudja Enterprises, which is strengthening our IP and algorithm. We followed by launching PERSEUS 2, our further generation compression software, just two years after its predecessor – which, excuse me if I stress – is unheard of in the industry. The speed of tech development is such these days that our clever engineers are indeed able to spin a second generation compression format (taking in the feedback of the first deployments) in such a short space of time. In the middle of it all we’ve closed a few more contracts, launched a product with Eutelsat and Sky became a shareholder.

My challenge – I guess – is now taking it all to market effectively. But it’s fun and what I love. 2017 has been heads down in the productization of PERSEUS 2 onto as many platforms as possible. No mean feat, believe me, considering that every other device coming to the market today is connected and can play video… At the end of it, we can say we’re able to encode PERSEUS 2 within an FFmpeg framework and we have ready-made appliances for PERSEUS 2 encoding for live and offline, contribution and distribution. But decoding has been the real accomplishment. We now have a full-HD real-time scripted decoder working within an HTML5 environment… if you’re not impressed, please read again. Every HTML5 browser can now decode PERSEUS 2 streams taking advantage of all of the low bandwidth, higher quality benefits. Hats off to the engineers again. And, of course, this is complemented by library support in iOS, Android and Windows 10 environments.

All of this means that 2018 will be the year of taking PERSEUS to Markets! Plural as we’re busy on many fronts on this end as well. We’ve announced progress in India and South East Asia in 2017 and I have been to the beautiful West Coast more times than my wife cared to count. It’s looking promising, challenging and more than anything: FUN.

So, let me salute 2018 with a fond look back at a busy 2017, which prepared it for more and more exciting stuff. While I renew my wishes for a great new year, please let me say that I also wish we can work even closer together. Don’t be a stranger and reach out.

All the Best

Fabio