TILEDMEDIA CLOSES ROUND A FUNDING FOR BREAK-THROUGH VR STREAMING TECHNOLOGY; LAUNCHES PORTFOLIO AT CES
Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 4 January 2018 – Tiledmedia, the leader in high-quality VR360 streaming, announced that it recently closed a round A investment by a group of business angels. With another investor about to join this Round A complemented by a government research loan, the company expects to shortly have 2 million USD available to extend its ClearVR product portfolio and bring it to market.
Tiledmedia is a spin-out of the Dutch national research institute TNO, where Tiledmedia’s founders worked for a number of years to lay the basis of the world’s most efficient and high-quality VR streaming technology. By cutting up the full 360-degree sphere in small tiles, and streaming only the tiles that are in view, Tiledmedia can reduce bandwidth by as much as 80% – or increase video quality dramatically while keeping bitrates in check, all with lightning-fast updatesThis allows content providers to stream their VR productions in the highest possible quality to the broadest possible audience.
Tiledmedia will publicly launch its ClearVR streaming portfolio at CES in Las Vegas. The company has a booth in the Holland Startup Pavilion in Eureka Park, in the Sands. ClearVR consists of a client-side SDK and a cloud processing platform. The ClearVR SDK is easily integrated into VR players for existing devices that contain industry-standard hardware video decoders, like most modern mobile phones and tablets do. Content distributors can use Tiledmedia’s ClearVR Cloud to encode and package their media catalogue in the right format for distribution. The technology is fully compatible with today’s Content Delivery Networks, since it relies on regular delivery over http and requires no per-client edge processing, which makes it massively and uniquely scalable.
Tiledmedia Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer Rob Koenen said: “VR services are only commercially relevant if they can be streamed – like with YouTube, users do not want to wait for content to download. Streaming VR at high quality simply requires too much bandwidth today, but our technology solves that problem. ClearVR enables streaming VR360 at an unparalleled 8k quality to today’s devices over today’s networks, even to those devices that only support 4k video. I very much look forward to showing our ClearVR product line to potential customers at CES”.
The investment was made by a group of business angels, headed by Paul Hendriks, ex-CTO and CIO of Ziggo, a Liberty Global brand. Hendriks said that “Tiledmedia’s technology is crucial to the success of the streaming VR market, by delivering much higher quality at substantially lower cost to a much broader consumer segment. The ‘angels’ believe in the technology but also in the team, which combines drive, talent, significant experience and leadership, and an impressive international business network. With this investment, Tiledmedia can enter its next phase of innovation and growth in this dynamic market”.
About Tiledmedia B.V.
Tiledmedia is global frontrunner in flexible and affordable low-latency network delivery of video content with extremely high resolutions to ordinary consumer devices. Through its advanced software products distributors of such content – e.g. VR360 or 180-degrees panoramic video – can reach the maximum number of viewers possible with the highest quality video content available. Advanced streaming features like directional streaming and zooming without resolution loss are an integral part of the product portfolio. Visit tiledmedia.com for more information.
Stay tuned!