05 Sep Meet Tiledmedia at IBC 2018, 14-18 September

Tiledmedia will be out in force at IBC 2018. See our dedicated IBC 2018 page for details.

12 Jul Tiledmedia Featured in De Telegraaf newspaper

On Wednesday 11 July, Tiledmedia was featured in the financial section of NL’s largest newspaper, De Telegraaf:  “Streaming VR Live“

It’s a very nice article; obviously in Dutch;  part of a weekly series highlighting companies in the SME Innovation Top 100 (“MKB Innovatie Top 100”), which runs until the final ranking is announced on September 26th. We were the first company to appear in this series!

29 Jun Tiledmedia in SME Innovation Top 100 2018

Tiledmedia was voted into the MKB (Small and Medium Enterprise) Innovation Top 100 recently. Secretary of State of Economic Affairs, Mona Keijzer, unveiled the list on 25 June. All 250 competitors were judged on relevance for the sector and society, originality, availability of the technology, revenue and growth potential.

The ranking within the 100 will be announced on September 26th. The announcement by the Dutch Chamber of Commerce is here (in Dutch).

01 May InnovationQuarter Announces Tiledmedia Investment

At the Rotterdam Capital Days, the West Holland Innovation Accelerator and investor InnovationQuarter went on stage to announce its recent investment in Tiledmedia and hand the traditional investment tomb stone to Tiledmedia CEO Frits Klok.

InnovationQuarter’s press release can be found here.

Left to right: Rob Koenen, Ray van Brandenburg, Anoesjka Imambaks (Venture Café), Francis Quint (IQ), Frits Klok, Marty le Clerq (IQ)

22 Mar “New Tech Promises Live VR QoE Far Superior to Olympics …”

Screen Plays Magazine features a great write-up by Fred Dawson on the state of VR Streaming, and why we need tiling. The article quotes a number of relevant sources from across the industry. Read it here: New Tech Promises Live VR QoE Far Superior to Olympics Coverage!

05 Jan ClearVR Wins Advanced Imaging Society’s 2018 Technology Award

Our groundbreaking ClearVR streaming technology is now also officially “Award-Winning”. The Advanced Imaging Society honored Tiledmedia with one of its 2018 Technology Awards for outstanding technical achievement in Entertainment Arts and Technologies.  And with Microsoft, Lytro  and Dolby among the winners, we are in very good company. Quoting from AIS’s website: “The Society’s globally recognized Lumiere Awards will be presented to technologies or processes which have demonstrated both innovation and impact in advancing the creation or delivery of quality content.”

And quoting from the press release:  “Our latest class of 10 Technology Awards honorees and our timely recognition of 13 women receiving our Distinguished Leadership Award encompass familiar names along with recent discoveries, all of which represent the most creative, productive and forward-thinking efforts in visual technology and emerging content,” said Jim Chabin, President and CEO of The Advanced Imaging Society.

Some more coverage here on Variety’s website.

Rob Koenen traveled to LA after CES to attend the awards luncheon on January 16th, and collected Tiledmedia’s first statuette on behalf of the team.

Rob thanked the AIS for the award. He said that he felt both honored and humbled to be among the winners, as a company that is barely a year old and until recently had only 4.5 people working for it. Rob further noted that he saw the Award as an indication that the belief is shared that immersive media hold great promise, but that the industry needs to keep working to improve the Quality of Experience.

See on Flickr for a few pictures.

We gave the statuette a nice place in our Rotterdam HQ, where it awaits the company of more awards. But it will be very hard to beat this statuette!

26 Dec Stereo Support Added to ClearVR

As of mid-December the ClearVR SDK and Packagers support stereoscopic content. We have been quietly testing it with a few partners, and it works fully as expected.

Adding support for stereoscopic content has been on our wish list for some time – and also on the wish lists of quite a few of our partners.

Next up: iOS support. Stay tuned!

17 Oct Videonet: VR360 environment cuts bit-rates by 75% and …

Nice article about our partner Viaccess-Orca’s Virtual Stadium solution – powered by ClearVR:

VR360 environment cuts bit-rates by 75% and offers new advertising and monetisation opportunities

22 Sep Videonet: Important IBC demos you may have missed

Writing for Videonet, John Moulding has a very nice write-up about the “VR-as-a-second-screen” demo we did with Ericsson and Sky:

Important IBC demos you may have missed

…

22 Sep IBC: Moving from Tech Demos to Products (and Download the ClearVR Brochure!)

COO Arjen Veenhuizen in a true VR interview at IBC

IBC was a great event. Lots of good feedback, lots of interest in our ClearVR technology. Our joint demo with Ericsson and Sky of VR-as-a-second-screen, to a head-mounted device and a tablet, drew significant interest. The same applies to the Virtual Stadium app shown by Viaccess-Orca, as well as the integration with spatial audio as shown by both DTS and Viaccess-Orca. Adding spatial audio makes VR a really immersive, compelling experience.

Transforming a technology demo to a set of convincing use cases made all the difference. What also made a difference: being able to show 6k streaming live, from Akamai’s production CDN, at the Akamai booth. And we didn’t just stream stream it over WiFi (always a huge challenge at a trade show) – we even showed 6k VR360 panoramas streaming over 4G. At the show!

Our ClearVR brochure is now available for download. It has a good summary of our SDK and Cloud solution.

Also, see the photo impression of Tiledmedia @IBC!

12 Sep First Integrated Solution for VR360 Streaming With Tiled Video and 3D Immersive Audio to be Demonstrated at IBC2017

PARIS — Sept. 12, 2017 — DTS, a global leader in high-definition audio solutions and a wholly owned subsidiary of Xperi Corporation (Nasdaq: XPER) (“Xperi”); Tiledmedia, a global frontrunner in flexible and affordable, low-latency delivery of extremely high-resolution video content to consumer devices; and Viaccess-Orca, a leading global solutions provider of OTT and TV platforms, content protection, and advanced data solutions for a personalized TV experience, will demonstrate the latest, most reliable way to deliver best-in-class VR360 audio and video for VR/AR via streaming media at IBC2017, Sept. 15-19 in Amsterdam.

Full release here

12 Sep NGCodec and Tiledmedia to Show Cloud Hardware-Accelerated Low-Latency HEVC VR360 Streaming Solution at IBC 2017

Sunnyvale / Rotterdam, Sep 12, 2016 07:00 (GMT+0:00) – Tiledmedia, a leader in tile-based directional Virtual Reality video streaming and NGCodec®, a company focused on FPGA-based video codec development, announced today that they have integrated their solutions to provide a cloud-based encoding service for efficient streaming of 360-degree Virtual Reality video (VR360). Tiledmedia is now able to offer high quality VR360 encoding using NGCodec’s hardware-accelerated HEVC encoder on an Amazon EC2 F1 instance, making the encoding and processing for Tiled VR streaming fast and affordable. The solution will be demonstrated at IBC 2017 in Amsterdam, from 15 to 19 September.

See full release here

09 Sep Sky, Ericsson, Tiledmedia to showcase VR live sports at IBC

Three members of the Virtual Reality Industry Forum (VRIF) – Sky, Ericsson and Tiledmedia – will showcase a real application of Virtual Reality (360 video) synced with live sports at this year’s IBC Show.

The companies will collaborate on an industry-first demonstration that will show how VR (360 video) can be used to enhance the viewing experience and deliver a truly immersive live TV event in the home.

Visitors to the Ericsson booth (Hall 1, D61) will have the opportunity to see what it’s like to be in the dugout when their favourite team scores a goal or at the wheel of a Formula 3 car when it makes that vital overtake, through untethered VR headsets and tablets, seamlessly synced with the main TV screen.

The demonstration will use Viewport-Adaptive streaming technology which harnesses Ericsson’s industry-leading HEVC software encoding technology and Tiledmedia’s innovative ClearVR tiled streaming technology to optimise the video quality to bandwidth ratio.

Content for the demo will centre around premier sports footage including Premier League football provided by Sky and Formula 3 4K HDR footage provided by Ericsson to illustrate different applications of how the technology can be used to complement a traditional broadcast view.

Together, Sky, Ericsson and Tiledmedia will show how the future consumer experience could change with the technology advances of VR (360 video) and how these technologies can truly make content come to life.

31 Aug Tiledmedia at IBC 2017: Impossible to Miss

If you are looking for innovation at IBC, it will be extremely hard not to run into Tiledmedia.

Our ClearVR tiled streaming technology will be demonstrated at the booths of quite a few innovative companies in the VR360 ecosystem, all of them leaders in their market segment: Akamai, Ericsson, Harmonic, Viaccess-Orca and DTS (an Xperi Company). Furthermore, we will be announcing integration with NGCodec for encoding in the cloud, on Amazon EC2 FPGA Instances, which puts us on a path to shortly support Live VR360 services.

This is in line with Tiledmedia’s market approach: to offer our technology through integration with best-of-breed partners rather than doing everything end-to-end ourselves.

Please contact us at hi@tiledmedia.com to see our ClearVR technology in action.

Akamai Technologies – 5.B52

A good CDN with many points of presence is important for any VR service, but it is absolutely crucial for Tiled VR Streaming. Working together, Akamai and Tiledmedia have implemented optimizations in Akamai’s network and in Tiledmedia’s ClearVR networking stack, enabling extremely rapid switching in response to head motion in head-mounted gear, and in response to zooming & panning on flat screens (tablets and phones). When access network conditions are favorable, the switching is virtually unnoticeable, which is unique for this type of solution.

At IBC, we are showing on-demand content streaming from Akamai’s production CDN to GearVR and an Oculus Rift headsets. We will also show VR streaming to an Android tablet for “flat navigation”.

The joint work will be presented at the Conference as well, where David Sztykman of Akamai will join Tiledmedia’s CTO Ray van Brandenburg in delivering the paper “CDN optimization for VR streaming”  at the Session Solving OTT’s Achilles’ Heel: Scale

Ericsson – 1.D61

Together with VRIF members Sky and Ericsson, we will showcase a real application of Virtual Reality (360 video) synced with live sports. This will be an industry-first demonstration of VR (360 video) enhancing the viewing experience and deliver a truly immersive live TV event in the home.

Visitors to the Ericsson booth (Hall 1, D61) will have the opportunity to see what it’s like to be in the dugout when their favorite team scores a goal or at the wheel of a Formula 3 car when it makes that vital overtake, through untethered VR headsets and tablets, seamlessly synced with the main TV screen.

We will show premier sports footage including Premier League football provided by Sky and Formula 3 4K HDR footage provided by Ericsson, to illustrate different applications of how the technology can be used to complement a traditional broadcast view.

Together, Sky, Ericsson and Tiledmedia will show how the future consumer experience will change with the technology advances of VR (360 video) and how these technologies will truly make content come to life.

Harmonic – 1.B20

At the booth of our partner-from-day-one Harmonic, and working with Viaccess-Orca and Digital Immersion, we’ll show tiled streaming to an untethered head-mounted device (Gear VR) and a flat screen (Android tablet). Sit between the host and the guest in a talk show, watch a tennis match at the edge of a court, or go on stage while Blue Man Group performs!

Viaccess-Orca – 1.A51

As another long-time partner, Viaccess-Orca has integrated our ClearVR SDK in a number of products. Together, we will show two demos:

• Viaccess-Orca’s completely revamped Virtual Arena app, a clean and attractive VR environment that lets users watch sports matches on a huge virtual screen. The Oculus/Android app allows these users to start fully immersive 360 views and supports social VR features.
• An Oculus/Android app that integrates immersive video with equally immersive audio. Both audio and video are of the highest quality, and both can be represented and transported very efficiently. This complete package is supported on today’s VR devices; a joint offering with DTS – see below.

DTS – 15.MS10 and Novotel Suite

The demo involves integrating high quality VR video with great immersive audio, and it’s a joint effort with Viaccess-Orca, and we’ll show the same demo – see above.

Contact us at hi@tiledmedia.com !

26 Aug Tiledmedia to pitch at IBC Startup Forum

Tiledmedia has been selected as one of the Startups to pitch at IBC’s Start-up Forum. See the full line-up of Investors and Startups here.

We will also be present with joint demos at six (!) partner booths, all six, without exception, industry leaders in their field. The details will be revealed early next week. One of them will be our long-term partner Harmonic, who briefly alludes to our joint demo in this press release.

23 Aug CED Magazine: “VR Tiling Technology Is Changing the Game in Virtual Reality Video”

Harmonic’s VP of Video Strategy, Thierry Fautier, wrote an article for CED Magazine based on the work Tiledmedia and Harmonic have been doing together. Quoting Fautier:

“There are several key benefits of VR tiling technology that make it attractive for commercial services. First and foremost, it allows streaming of VR content at a very high quality, using realistic and affordable bitrates. With this method and optimized video encoding, bitrates can be reduced by up to 80 percent without quality loss. Moreover, significant improvements can be made to the quality at bitrates similar to those used by a system that streams the entire sphere.”

Read the full article here.

22 Jul Already preparing for CES 2018

It feels early, but we’re already picking hotels and flights for Las Vegas in January 2018.

While we spent our time in a hotel suite during CES 2017 this year, we’re now going to have our own presence at the show floor. Tiledmedia has been selected to have a CES 2018 show floor presence at the Holland Startup Pavilion, an initiative by StartupDelta. The Pavilion is in Eureka Park, the most dynamic area of CES.

We are proud to be picked, as the interest for this mission is very strong. The highly successful 2017 CES mission with 30 carefully selected Dutch Startups was headed by Minister of Economic Affairs Henk Kamp, and the Dutch Government’s Special Startup Envoy Constantijn van Oranje. The mission received a lot of press attention and we fully expect that the 2018 event will be the same.

This will be our second mission to Las Vegas, after NAB last April.

And we surely hope that for Tiledmedia, what happens in Las Vegas won’t stay in Las Vegas.

14 Jul IBC 2017: Paper and Presence

Gearing up for IBC in two months!

Our joint paper with Akamai on optimization of VR delivery will be presented by Tiledmedia’s CTO Ray van Brandenburg in the session called “Solving OTT’s Achilles’ Heel – Scale“, on Friday 15 September at 15:30 in the Emerald Room. This session will focus on delivering immersive media over the top. Rob Koenen will chair the VR and AR – the Production, the Potential and the Pitfalls Paper Session.

Tiledmedia will also be present on quite a number of partner booths with very exciting VR streaming demos – announcements to follow, but we can already note that we will show solutions for immersive media on flat displays and in headsets, and tiled video integrated with immersive audio.

30 Jun BT looking at tiled VR streaming

Speaking at The Future of Broadcasting conference on 28 June, Andrew Gower, head of the interactive media research group at BT, spoke about providing significantly higher quality for BT’s experimental VR broadcasts. Digital TV Europe reported:

“[…] another solution is to stream only the part of the field of vision that viewers are focusing on at any one time. Gower said that, in VR, people are typically only looking at a part of the screen. BT has worked with Huawei and Tiledmedia to capture very high resolution video, initially in 8K, to extract out the specific viewpoint of an individual, which is delivered to the viewer instead of transmitting the whole 360° field. ” (full article here)

(This is what we showed at BT Innovation 2017 – see previous post – with Tilemedia’s tiling technology integrated into Viaccess-Orca‘s Virtual Stadium App for the Gear VR.)

23 Jun A recent LinkedIn post

Just a quick link – The strongest impact of a Tiled VR demo is on those that have actually tried to stream VR themselves, and know how hard it is to do well. Here’s a response to our demo at BT Innovation 2017: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6281384906060767232. (The other system referenced in the post is an edge transcoding system from Huawei)