Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Elemental Rolls Out GPU-Accelerated Video Streaming Product

Portland-based Elemental Technologies, which is backed by General Catalyst Partners, Voyager Capital, the Oregon Angel Fund, the Bend Venture Conference and Seattle Alliance of Angels, said today that it has rolled out its massively parallel video processing product, Elemental Live. The firm said the system--which taps graphical processing units (GPUs) found in video acceleration cards to accelerate processing of video streaming--said that its product provides video and audio encoding for live streaming. The product is targeted at broadcasters, online video sites, and other new media providers. The firm says it "dramatically reduces" the cost of encoding appliances. The firm's appliances can encode up to four, simultaneous 1080p output streams or eight 720p output streams in a single appliance. Elemental is looking to leverage the increasing capabilities of GPUs to reduce the need for CPU processing power on video encoding, which is typically very compute intensive.