Euclid Discoveries, far from throwing in the towel, continues to push the envelope on the their claims for incredible compression.
As reported in this article on the Sys-Con Media (publisher of a zillion minor trade rags) web site, Euclid now says their Object Based Compression technology can be applied to any type of video, including standard video from TV shows and DVDs.
This is a big step up from their previous announcements, which limited the use of their codec to talking-head style video conferencing.
And what do you get by using this Object Based Compression technology? Oh, perhaps a 460% improvement over compression using MPEG-4, the current state of the art.
How They Do It
This OBC stuff is not total hocus pocus, and Euclid would be happy to give you a bit of an explanation of how it’s done:
Euclid defines OBC as technology that analyzes salient structure in the video to achieve higher compression ratios. This application of OBC is a major advancement when considering other compression technologies, including MPEG-4, which is based on “Discrete Cosine Transform” or “DCT.”
…
The architects of MPEG-4 technology anticipated OBC as the future video standard but, prior to Euclid Discoveries, no firm had managed to make OBC commercially viable. The MPEG-4 standard describes the parts of a rudimentary form of object-based compression through “Video Object Planes,” facial modeling, and 3D object modeling — providing only a definition of these concepts without providing the means of applying these directly towards the goal of high compression ratios.
For those who aren’t familiar with the Euclid Discoveries, they’ve been raising money from Angel investors as described here, and I’ve had plenty of voodoo curses pointed at me from their investors. Despite the years of promises, they haven’t delivered anything approaching a demo yet, and it seems that with this most recent announcement, the trend continues. As we say here in Texas, big hat, no cattle.
But that doesn’t stop Richard Wingard, Founder and CEO from doing a little chest-thumping:
“Our recent accomplishments should effectively silence the naysayers who said that EuclidVision was a one-trick pony that would only work with video-conferencing type applications,” said Euclid Discoveries President Robert Werner. “Now that we have shown the breadth of EuclidVision in tackling different video types, we plan to go deep, achieving further breakthroughs in compression rates.”
But who knows, their web site could have a player and some sample video posted for the world to see tomorrow.
Or not.
4 users commented in " Euclid Discoveries, More Incredible Claims, Must Be Monday "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackWhy isn’t the world (spelled microsoft/verizon/sony) beating their door down?
Yeah, well that’s a pretty obvious question. Just as fair disclosure, I tried to set up a demo with my big company, which buys up technology and smaller companies like popcorn. Euclid apparently couldn’t be bothered to even talk.
This is what one would refer to as a “red flag”, eh?
You bring up good points Mark. In your honest opinion (IF Euclid was Capable) how many billion would something like this sell for?
If Euclid delivered on what they were promising, their invention would certainly have value. But not as much as they might like to think, and I think a good research firm could put a number on it.
No matter how incredible their compression is, its value is determined by the royalty stream that can be derived over the life of the patent. So where is the big money? You might worm your way into a new HD-DVD standard, which would take a couple of years. You’d then be looking at something less than a buck per-player built – maybe 50 cents. (believe me, they aren’t going to pay more.) If you were to sell one of these DVD players to attach to every family TV in the world over the remaining 13 years of the patent, you might be talking about a few billion in revenue.
So what’s that revenue stream worth? I can’t tell you for sure, could be a couple billion though. But that’s very optimistic. Anyone buying Euclid’s technology has to reckon that they can actually make that happen – and they’re going to have to discount the payout dramatically because of that risk.
And of course, because their technology is built on top of MPEG-4 – at least according to their web site – they’re going to have to share that pie with a pool of patent holders who are under no obligation to deal with them. That’s another big problem that introduces a huge element of risk, and could cut the payout in half or worse.
They’ll tell you that their product is going to create new markets with huge new streams of revenue. But over the life of the patent, nothing is going to come close to the number of TVs and DVD players sold in terms of units. A hot new device like the iPod is selling 20, maybe 25 million units per year five years after introduction. New markets take a long time to develop.
But, it’s all pie-in-the-sky anyway. Nobody at Euclid is running the numbers, because they don’t have any buyers. They don’t have any buyers because they don’t have anything to sell. At least that’s the way I see it. They’ve been talking big for five years and have nothing to show for it but a giant pool of investors who got sucked into buying stock at tupperware parties. The poor people don’t even have the right to challenge the ownership because their stock is held in LLCs that actually own the Euclid stock.
There’s a lesson in all this.
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