Elemental Technologies Makes Video Delivery Faster, More Efficient

The Sports Video Group is pleased to welcome Elemental Technologies as a Premier Sponsor. A provider of video-processing solutions that enable multiplatform content delivery, the company pioneered the use of graphics processor units (GPUs) for image processing and video conversion to support adaptive video streaming as well as traditional broadcasting. Elemental products help content programmers, service providers, and broadcasters deliver video to any screen, at any time — all at once.

“In today’s market, we are seeing an exponential step up in the amount of content being created by professional video producers,” says VP of Marketing Keith Wymbs. “Content programmers and distributors must account for the iPad, iPhone, Droid devices, PCs, and more. It’s a never-ending battle creating a real strain on the resources used to compress and store increased amounts of video content. Having a technology solution that allows a media company to deliver video faster or do it with more efficient processing power is a huge advantage.”

Chief among the company’s products are Elemental Live and Elemental Server, both launched in the past 18 months.

Elemental Live is a video processing system that provides video and audio encoding for live event streaming to online and mobile platforms. The system was a Mario Award-winner at NAB in 2010 and a 2011 Streaming Media Editors’ Pick.

Elemental Server is a file-based video-transcoding system that accelerates a media company’s conversion of content libraries from a single format to a variety of formats, including those for mobile devices, tablets, and PCs.

“Our solutions are perfectly suited for live streaming events or taking the large archives of content that a programmer or distributor has and helping them to convert it to other formats quickly,” says Wymbs. “Industry testing has shown that we set the bar in terms of the performance and speed of our solutions. In library conversion applications, a customer can either complete jobs 4-5 times faster than when using competitive solutions, or complete projects in the same time with less than half the cost of competing solutions. With our solutions, customers can make these kinds of tradeoffs without sacrificing quality.”

According to Elemental, seven of the top 10 media companies in the U.S. — CBS, Disney, and PBS among them — rely on Elemental. In addition, both Big Ten Network and WWE deploy Elemental systems to deliver content to several digital platforms.

Big Ten Network uses Elemental Live to stream live video to iPhones and iPads using Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming protocol via Akamai’s CDN.

Elemental Live also was tapped to meet encoding and streaming requirements when WWE shifted its Tuesday-night television programming exclusively to the Internet last year. According to Wymbs, Elemental’s systems are more adept at handling the complexity of simultaneously processing multiple outputs of WWE’s fast motion, highly-produced content. Traditional H.264 encoders often struggle with the combined need for density and quality when the content is challenging to compress.

“A big reason that Elemental became an SVG sponsor is to better harness this technology within the sports market,” says Wymbs. “We have a number of leading sports brands using Elemental solutions, and we want to help other SVG members best take advantage of our capabilities when it comes to sports.”

Founded in 2006, Elemental is headquartered in Portland, OR. For more information on Elemental Technologies, visit http://www.elementaltechnologies.com.