V-NOVA

V-NOVA is a multinational IP and Technology company headquartered in London, UK. It is best known for innovation in data compression technology for video and images. V-Nova has partnered with large organizations including Sky, Xilinx, Nvidia, Eutelsat, and Amazon Web Services to provide its video compression technology.

History
V-NOVA was founded in 2011 by Guido Meardi, Pierdavide Marcolongo and others. In 2012, Mr Federico Faggin was among V-NOVA’s investors and founding members.

In 2016, Sky acquired a minority stake in V-NOVA for £4.5 million [8], and Eutelsat subsequently acquired a minority stake for an undisclosed amount. In the same year, Eutelsat deployed V-NOVA's technology for the 4K contribution feeds of the UEFA Euro Championship 2016 and, subsequently, acquired a minority stake for an undisclosed amount. Also in 2016, V-NOVA became a member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

In 2017, V-NOVA acquired the entire Faroudja patent portfolio to improve its Perseus codec.

In April 2019, V-NOVA technology was selected by MPEG for the working draft of the MPEG-5 codec enhancement standard. In the same year V-Nova became a member of the Advanced Television Systems Committee.

In 2020, V-NOVA and Amazon Web Services collaborated.

In May 2021, V-NOVA announced its partnership with SOUTHWORKS for LCEVC Integration Services.

In June 2021, V-NOVA partnerred with D-Orbit and Unibap to demonstrate VC-6 for on-orbit satellite imagery acceleration. The satellite was launched in Summer 2021. In July, multiple professional investors, including Intesa's Venture Capital arm Neva SGR, invested €33m into V-NOVA.

In November 2021, V-NOVA and PresenZ released a Six Degrees of Freedom (6DoF) movie on the Steam Store. The movie uses V-NOVA’s point-cloud compression technology combined with 6DoF volumetric movie format from PresenZ.

In January 2022, SBTVD Forum approved a selection of technologies for SBTVD 3.0 which include MPEG-5 LCEVC, V-NOVA & Harmonic Inc.’s submission.

Technology
In 2015, the company announced a new digital data-encoding technology based on multi-layer coding, parallel processing and deep learning called Perseus for efficient video streaming with a focus on enabling UHD/4K services at lower bandwidths. It was claimed that it could be streamed to TVs and other devices using only around 50% of the bandwidth required by existing streaming technologies.

V-NOVA’s technology was later selected to provide the essential IP for the ISO/IEC 23094-2 standard MPEG-5 Part 2 Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC), a codec-agnostic enhancement codec that can be combined with other video codecs to improve their coding and processing efficiency. It also maintains compatibility with the device ecosystem of the enhanced codec.

V-NOVA also developed another international standard codec, SMPTE VC-6 ST 2117, aimed at professional video and Artificial Intelligence applications.

In April 2021, MPEG Video validated the Verification Test of LCEVC (Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding) standard ((ISO/IEC 23094-2). Test results tended to indicate an overall benefit also when using LCEVC to enhance AVC, HEVC, EVC and VVC.

Awards
The CSI Awards recognized V-NOVA as Best Digital Video Processing Technology in 2015 and 2017. V-NOVA was named Best of Show by the TV Technology Awards for four consecutive years in 2015, 2016, 2017, & 2018. It was also named Best of Show for its PERSEUS-powered Universal Media Player by TVB Europe in 2015, 2016, and 2017.

In 2016, the Diplomatic Council Awards named V-NOVA as Global Media Innovator. V-NOVA was recognized for its point cloud compression scheme by the Advanced Image Society at the 12th annual Entertainment Technology Lumiere Awards in 2022.