Monday, May 14, 2012
Interview with Sam Blackman, Elemental Technologies
With the explosion of video on the Internet, and a similar explosion in the number of video capable devices in the world, content providers and Internet service providers have a problem: how to serve video to all those different formats. How do you solve that problem? One way, is to tap the hardware and software of Portland-based Elemental Technologies (www.elementaltechnologies.com). Elemental--which just announced a new round of funding earlier this week--develops hardware which leverage off-the-shelf graphical process units (GPUs) for its products. We learned more about the firm by talking with Sam Blackman, the firm's CEO.
For people who aren't familiar with Elemental, tell us what your products are all about?
Sam Blackman: Elemental builds video processing solutions for powering streaming video. Our systems take video that was created for legacy video delivery architectures, like cable, over-the-air broadcast, IPTV, or satellite, and we can then repurpose that for distributing it to multiple streams, such as to an iPod, iPad, iPhone, Android device, Flash player, or boxes like the Roku. We can handle any kind of format over IP, and create and format the video for delivering to those devices.
Why is it necessary to adapt to all those different devices?
Sam Blackman: Each device uses a different video standard to display video. A Flash player on your PC uses one standard, and an Apple player on the iPad uses another. The Boxee box uses a third standard. All of that video needs to be processed--which is called transcoding--which is when you take one coding standard and convert it to another standard, and deliver it to the device. That process of transcoding something is something we've focused on optimizing.
Can you talk about the advantage of your technology and using graphical processing units (GPUs) to do this transcoding?
Sam Blackman: The unique differentiator of Elemental over others are GPUs. GPUs were designed for making 3D games really fast on your PC, Xbox 360, or PlayStation, or to help artists, engineers, architects, and CAD/CAM engineers design things in three dimensions. What we recognized, is that GPUs are very powerful, and also very programmable. We figured out that we could write software for video processing, which takes advantage of these GPUs, which allows us to leverage off-the-shelf pieces of hardware for video processing. We did that, and we're pretty happy that it generated a dramatic improvement in video quality, performance, and density of a system. We replace five to ten of our competitors with every one of our GPU-accelerated systems. That's a huge advantage of the existing, conventional way of processing video.
As you've done this, have you found it's been easy to leverage the new generations of GPUs, and that it's fairly easy to port to the next GPU model?
Sam Blackman: It's just like a CPU. When Intel releases a new CPU, you put it in your machine, and it runs a little faster. GPUs are the same, except that when you plug it in, it runs twice as fast every time. There's been a performance increase over three generations of GPUs since we started the company, and performance has literally doubled every single time.
Where are you seeing your best customer adoption and current growth?
Sam Blackman: That's a great question. We started out really focused on programmers, people that own content. Examples of our early customers were people like ABCNEWS.com, ESPN, and HBO. Last year, we said--we've done a really great job on our initial segment of programmers, let's focus on content distributors. Those are Comcast, Avail, and a few more we haven't announced publicly. We started with programmers and evolved to service providers. We're starting to see work in the enterprise as well. Our customer base is really growing rapidly. I describe us as having revenue of six digits in 2008, seven digits in 2009, and last year crossed the eight digit in revenue market, with over $10M in revenues. We've added to our core base of programmers with the service providers and enterprises, and so we've continued to grow at a rapid level.
What's the biggest issues customers in your industry are facing?
Sam Blackman: I talk about the expanding video universe. The amount of video every decade has grown exponentially. We have gone from roughly, in 2000, video distribute which is the size of the earth. In 2010, it had grown to the size of the sun. There have been enormous leaps in the amount of video created, and the number of devices that can accept video that has been generated. It's been a multiplicative event, and the challenge is how to build a system that scales, and can keep up with the processing required to deliver that content effectively. GPUs are a great solution for keeping up with multiplicative content which is being generated and distributed. We're going to continue on system that make the delivery of that great tsunami of video more effective.
What's the next big thing you're working on?
Sam Blackman: The big focus is on international expansion. We opened up an office in London last year, and they've done a great job. That office now represents 20 percent of our revenues, and they've only been open for nine months. We're now expanding in Asia, and opened up in Asia Pacific in Hong Kong last quarter. There's a lot of focus on our international business, and making Elemental a global business and global brand.
Thanks!