NGCodec and Tiledmedia show hardware-accelerated Cloud VR360 streaming at IBC

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

AMSTERDAM — 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.

Oliver Gunasekara, CEO of NGCodec, said: “The NGCodec FPGA encoder provides a 10 times reduction in cost over current cloud-based software x.265 encoding, with high quality encoding settings and an extremely low latency.” Rob Koenen, Chief Business Officer of Tiledmedia, added: “Integration of NGCodec’s solution in our ClearVR 360 Cloud was straightforward. We are very pleased that we can now offer fast, efficient, and high quality encoding of Tiled VR360 content.”

The integrated solution supports resolutions of 8k x 4k and higher. Such resolutions give significantly better quality for VR services than the legacy 4k x 2k content, which is used in current services. With Tiledmedia’s tile-based ClearVR 360 streaming technology, 8k content can be streamed to today’s devices that can only decode 4k resolutions, such as Samsung’s popular Gear VR. Tiledmedia’s ClearVR streaming can be used for head-mounted displays, and on flat devices such as phones and tablets. The joint, integrated solution is a major step towards support for live encoding in the cloud, a crucial capability for live VR360 services.

Content encoded with the solution can be seen at the booth of Viaccess-Orca, 1.A51, at IBC.