Tveon to begin trials with major US carriers later this month

By Barry Flynn, Contributing Editor

British Columbian video compression specialist Tveon, which dropped a bombshell last October with its claim that it could deliver 4K-resolution UHD TV at below 2Mbit/s and 1080p images at below 200Kbit/s, says it’s getting ready “to ramp up testing with some major players” later this month (January).

CEO Scott Hayward said these included “several large carriers in the States that we are executing NDAs with,” and hinted that the company was poised to reveal more details towards the middle of February.

Currently, the testing that is being carried out by prospective customers generally follows a three-phase process, said Hayward, according to which “they come in and kick the tires and see that it’s actually real, then it’s [them] sending files over so we compress them and send them back so they can take a look at them. The third phase is usually when we take a look at their network and see how we can best fit in with [it].”

Hayward revealed that Tveon has also held trials with an undisclosed equipment vendor and said, “we’re now in chats with their chip-maker to go a little bit further [and] deeper into integration into their product.”

Hayward emphasised that interest in Tveon’s compression technologies was not confined to North America, saying that the company now had a “large collection” of potential partners in Europe, including the UK: “it seems as though Europe has very much opened their eyes to us and have started approaching us,” he said. Many of the companies concerned are “traditional OTT plays where they’re third-party delivered over other carriers’ networks,” said Hayward. “There seems to be an aggressive OTT play going on in Europe – and I think we can actually offer a great service for those offerings,” he said. Tveon had also been approached by companies as far afield as Asia and Australia, he added.

Tveon did not exhibit at CES, but Hayward said he intended to be present at NAB in Las Vegas in April, by which time he anticipated being able to provide interested parties with independent verification of Tveon’s compression claims.

Hayward recognized that the emergence of an ‘Ultra HD Premium’ standard at CES now needed to be taken into account. “We’re just now in conversations to get that type of content and to start testing on it – we’ll have numbers very soon for that,” he said. While “it will make a little difference to what we quoted,” he suggested, he was confident that Tveon’s technologies would still offer “a dramatic rate” for UHD compression “compared to other providers out there today.”

Hayward made it clear that the principal “other provider” he had in mind was V-Nova, which claimed at launch that its PERSEUS platform was able to encode UHD video at 8Mbit/s – nearly a third of the then current rate of around 21Mbit/s for HEVC-compressed UHD material.

Indeed, he conceded, it was V-Nova’s claims that had forced Tveon to come out of stealth mode last year. “We were worried that they might get too much traction and get too embedded, […] even though we possibly have a much better product,” he said. The result was, Hayward implied, that Tveon had launched when it was not really quite ready to do so. “We were a little slow to the punch, because we jumped the gun,” he admitted.