Apple buys WaveOne, probably for AI-driven video compression

Apple recently acquired a US video compression algorithm start-up called WaveOne, says TechCrunch. The company was building content aware AI-driven compression and decompression tools.

Wave Hello, WaveOne

Based in California, WaveOne was founded in 2016. The company was looking at the challenge of video compression and sought to use machine intelligence to build contextually aware compression and decompression tools that would make video files much smaller to distribute.

The idea was that by compressing less relevant elements within a video frame the system would reduce the overall file size. To achieve this, the company’s AI would prioritize key elements like faces or text. The company said its tech could reduce the size of video files by half while maintaining video quality.

Of course, to work best video compression tools need to function across multiple platforms and devices. WaveOne claimed its tools to be hardware-agnostic. That means it should run on most smartphones and almost certainly on Macs running Apple Silicon.

How might this technology be useful to Apple?

In numerous ways. Not only might it choose to weave these compression tools within its devices at an operating system level, creating smart compression tools for video also has implications across Apple’s professional and consumer video creation products, as well as across its own streaming services.

The purchase also seems to blend well with Apple’s existing work around machine imaging intelligence and quite possibly has some relevance to how the company intends approaching development of its AR goggles. The latter will host cameras which conceivably will be used to share video – after all, one demonstration of these products featured a man showing his wife around London using cameras in his goggles. The challenge is to make the video produced by such systems sufficiently portable, which a better video compression codec may help Apple do.

It is interesting this deal slipped past most of us. The deal was confirmed by a former WaveOne exec on LinkedIn way back in February. Apple has of course said nothing about the acquisition, but several people once connected with WaveOne now work at the iPhone maker.

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