Bitmovin streams seven figure sum

Bitmovin, a spin-out of Klagenfurt University, has raised an undisclosed seven figure investment from Austria-based public and private investors.

Early-stage fund SpeedInvest and Constantia Industries, whose core markets span several industries from furniture to solar energy, have each made equity investments. Public agencies joining the round are Austria Wirtschaftsservice Gesellschaft, a federal development bank, and Kärntner Wirtschaftsförderungs Fonds, a regional investment fund.

Bitmovin’s technology offers transcoding-as-a-service, that is, the encoding of video files in the cloud. Any movie that is streamed to a user exists in several different versions on the server, with the server and the user’s device constantly negotiating the highest possible quality at the available bandwidth. The technique is known as adaptive bitrate streaming and is the reason why a video might sometimes become pixelated for a few seconds if the connection becomes too slow. If it were not for adaptive streaming, the movie would simply stop and buffer the one, high quality, video available.

Bitmovin’s technology is able to speed the encoding process up significantly, creating several versions of a two-hour long movie in high-definition within minutes. Current solutions need about two hours. The technology is fully compliant with current standards.

The spin-out plans to use the investment to expand its team by hiring an additional 18 staff.

Stefan Lederer, chief executive at Bitmovin, said: “Today, content providers are expanding the distribution of their on-demand and live offerings to the web and across multiple devices including and beyond TV. Due to the increasing customer expectations, the success of them depends on the offered video quality. Bitmovin provides end-to-end adaptive bitrate transcoding services and high-performance players for any platform, enabling our customers to offer the highest quality of service, while minimising distribution costs through the efficient use of video encoding, HTTP-based delivery and caching infrastructure.”