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Bandwidth-smashing Brit start-up V-Nova sneaks out SDK

If you’re struggling to get Netflix working over a super-slow connection, then you might be pleased to learn that V-Nova has launched an SDK for its bandwidth compressing Perseus software. 

Last year the plucky British start-up teamed up with EE and successfully streamed live 4K video at 50fps over a measly 6Mbps mobile connection. When you consider that Amazon and Netflix recommend that you need around 20-25Mbps in order for Ultra HD streams to work properly, that’s pretty amazing. 

V-Nova’s executive chairman and co-founder Eric Achtmann believes it has implications for customers in areas where mobile signal is patchy and superfast services are non-existent; Perseus has also delivered 720p HD video over a weedy 300kbps connection. 

4K video on a phone IS possible over 4G: EE and V-Nova prove it, Sony Z5 Premium fans rejoice, What is 4K? Ultra HD, 8K and Super Hi-Vision TV explained To date, V-Nova’s run trials with a number of other companies including set-top box chipmakers Broadcom, mobile mast manufacturers Alcatel-Lucent. Last year, Sky Italia was able to use Perseus to reduce usage over studio-to-studio contribution links and avoid having to fork out for an expensive infrastructure upgrade. 

Guido Meardi, V-Nova’s CEO and co-founder says that the SDK (software development kit) release is the result of these past collaborations and hopes that more companies will sign up to reap the benefits of Perseus. 

Meardi said: “We have now packaged the software to make it more readily scalable and available for TV service providers and platform operators to deploy on any equipment or media player in their ecosystem.” 

Perhaps best of all, Perseus has been extensively tested out on current-gen iOS and Android devices. Should the likes of the BBC, Sky and others start using it, customers streaming content from iPlayer and Sky Go should benefit from more resilient as well as higher quality streams. 

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