San Jose, Calif. – NanoTech Entertainment said Friday that it has partnered with LumaForge to provide consumers with a cost-effective pipeline for the delivery of VP9 compressed 4K content streamed through NanoTech’s Nuvola NP-1 streaming media player.
VP9, Google’s open-source, royalty free video compression standard, reduces video file sizes-and the associated bandwidth requirements-without any reduction in quality or patent royalties to pay.
“There are two critical enabling technologies required in order for UHD TV panel upgrades to take off in the home–4K compression and cost-effective set-top boxes,” said Neil Smith, LumaForge CEO. “And, they have to be delivered at the right price. We already decided on the Nuvola NP-1 with its pure streaming capabilities as the 4K player set-top box for our pipeline. Then, in comparing HEVC compression (from the MPEG LA consortium) and VP9 (from Google) to see which can squeeze the best-looking 4K images into the smallest pipe at the best price, we found that VP9 is not only royalty free, it’s pretty darn efficient.”
Powered by a NVIDIA Tegra 4 Quad Core mobile processor, the Nuvola NP-1 is a multifunction device that can be used to decode 4K Ultra HD, HD, SD and 3D movies in addition to playing 3D video games. It can also stream content from a variety of sources, including the bundled UltraFlix UHD channel, which serves 4K content for streaming; and other services such as Netflix, Hula Plus, XBMC, Amazon Instant and YouTube.
NanoTech sales & marketing senior VP Aaron Taylor said: “With the rapidly increasing adoption of 4K Ultra HD TV’s in the home, the need for a cost-effective, end-to-end pipeline continues to grow exponentially. Consumers want a complete 4K solution that includes all of the components they’ll need for acquisition, processing, delivery and consumption so they can be confident they will all work together. We continue to add support for the latest codecs on our platform providing our customers with the best 4K Streaming experience available in the market. In testing both VP9 and HEVC (H.265) on the Nuvola platform, it has been our experience that VP9 offers better overall performance and compression across the variety of content that we are distributing.”
NanoTech and LumaForge have also partnered on making the services of 4K Studios, a subsidiary of NanoTech, available to content producers in Hollywood.
