« Wrestlemania and Web 2.0 | Main | Money For De Nuo New Thing »
February 22, 2006
France's imaging wizardry pulls VC cash
Three French startups that specialize in digital compression and imaging technology have been funded in the past couple of weeks.
Are the VCs backing these ventures all hoping that French technology giant, Thomson, will soon be back in the market to buy up some more pieces of technology to support its morph from a television manufacturer into a broadcast and digital video giant? Last year it made a few VCs happy with its €100M (estimated) acquisition of Inventel and its buy of Cirpack.
We don't know the answer to that one, but we do know a bit about the recent investment activity. Let It Wave, a startup pushing a proprietary video compression technology, raised € 6M from iSource Gestion and Iris Capital this month, Dxo raised $10M in expansion capital to develop its photo enhancing software, and Ateme, a supplier of standards-based video compression tech raised €4M from Xange and Ventech.
Let It Wave was founded in 2001 by four mathematician founders (all from the same French polytechnic or university) to sell their video and image enhancement software and services to security, defence, seismic imaging, satellite imaging and medical imaging manufacturers . In the past, the firm positioned its product as a better but proprietary alternative to JPEG and JPEG 2000 standards. The VCs became interested when they realized that the technology could also be applied to a much larger market, the emerging high definition television (HDTV) broadcast market.
Let It Wave is going to use the capital to for product development.
UPDATE : We were wrong in our original description of Let it Wave's current products. Please see below for a correction. Our original assessment, in italics below, is also wrong as a result.
We've seen quite a few startups in this part of Europe come out with non-standard technologies for video imaging only to end up squeezed into a tiny niche within the much larger video market. It is not going to be easy pushing a non-standard video format on its own.
Correction:
"We do not offer video compression," said Alban d'Halluin, VP Marketing, in an email to the a:c euro. "It is true that in the past, Let It Wave developed image compression technology for ID photos, but our products for the HDTV market are chips that perform video super-resolution scaling," he said.
In other words, the chips perform a conversion from SD (e.g. 720x486 pixel images) to HD (e.g. 1280x720 pixel images) using deinterlacing and scaling algorithms.
Let It Wave is not going to use the capital to develop codecs, as we wrote, it is concentrating on developing chips that perform the conversion of SD sequences to HD, and with no need for compression or codec technology.
"Our chips will convert a decoded raw SD video stream into a raw HD video stream. Both input and output streams are raw uncompressed video," said Halluin.
The idea being that the chips can then be integrated into a TV chipset or into a broadcast box. "Every single flat screen TV has such a functionality included as flat screen TVs cannot display interlaced content and require a conversion to progressive scan and a scaling to the panel resolution.... We provide a finally good enough quality to manufactueres who have been seeking for such solutions for years and were compelled to use poor quality solutions," said Halluin
For small size TVs, there is a "single-chip" architecture, i.e. a single chip performs MPEG decoding, video processing (deinterlacing, scaling, enhancement) and panel control. For mid-range and high-end TVs, very often we see a multi chip architecture: one chip for decoding, a high quality video-processing chip (like ours) a panel control chipset. Then it is always a trade-off between quality and price.
Haluin added a comment on competitors too:
We have direct competitors who provide scaling and deinterlacing chips: Genesis (the famous DCDi by Faroudja chip), Gennum, Silicon Optix are the most famous. All these chips perform the same function: they take a raw video stream and output it at any specified resolution and any scan mode. They differ by their price (Let It Wave will offer a much lower one) and by the visual quality of the output. On that point, we offer a breakthrough technology (bandlet-based motion compensation techniques) which results are far better according to all the benchmarks made by broadcasters and industry leaders.
Wavelets are used in JPEG.2000 image compression and decoding does, while Fourier/Cosine transforms are used in JPEG image compression standard. Let It Wave developed the bandelets transform.
Read - DXO financing round (the a:c euro)
Read - Let It Wave financing round (Press Release)
Posted on February 22, 2006 04:15 PM | Posted to Digital imaging | Venture Capital | Permalink
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/505
