updated
Blackwave, a video storage company that says it can store video seven to ten times more efficiently than other technologies, has raised $16 million more in a second round of financing. The company’s bold technology claims, however, can’t be verified just yet: It plans to roll out its video product in the first quarter of next year.
The market for video storage is large and increasing, because online video quality is increasing and there are more people streaming it, and so storage demands are exploding too, both from publishers who need to store it all somewhere, but also content delivery networks that store video too, such as Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks. Blackwave serves both publishers and CDN.
The company has changed its name from Ancinon. Blackwave’s investors include Sigma Partners, Globespan Capital Partners and IDG Ventures Boston.
The Acton, Mass. company’s product is a mixture of hardware and software components. The hardware is off-the-shelf. On the software side, there are two parts. First, the software improves the process of how to store data. It seeks to understand the content, for example to distinguish between a user-generated video or a tv show. It does this by checking the “meta data” of information contained around a video identifying the name of the content and creator, for example. Then Blackwave’s software algorithms deliver storage resources based on the popularity of the content.
Update: For a more in-depth review, see GigaOm’s piece here.
2 Comments
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Jason said:
I’m highly skeptical of Blackwave’s claims. Granted I haven’t actually seen their product in operation, and my skepticism isn’t likely to cause even a hiccup in their plans to take whatever they have created to market, but it just seems too fishy. First off, Binary data is always binary data, and many smart people have done a lot to improve the efficiency of storing binary data. Lightweight file systems have greatly reduced any gains that might be had by “improving” things. If they have some compression routine it isn’t likely to do much for already well compressed video (just take any compressed video and try to ZIP it, RAR it, GZip it, etc and see how much improvement you get), and it would only increase CPU requirements when hosting (disk space is cheap, and getting cheaper). The real tell for me, is in the teaser element about scanning meta data for User Generated vs. Commercially Produced and tweaking the profile. The thing is you shouldn’t need to do anything like this on an actual video hosting service. The context of how you received the video would tell you enough (and not require any algorithms), and popularity is a moving target, so a hit counter and play rate calculator would give you enough pieces to know if you need to implement a different hosting strategy. So if the algorithms are obvious and high performance hosting can be achieved by building a smart media server farm (which replicates popular content to decrease individual server load) out of Linux and commodity hardware, then all Blackwave could really be bringing to the table is a turn key server solution which would only be valuable until the open source community has a comparable solution (which they very well might by now already). Its these extra useless details that tend to suggest an investment opportunity that is more smoke and mirrors than actual substance. But if they have $16 million in the bank, then they should have enough money to prove all of their naysayers wrong (unless they aren’t spending it wisely)
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Ramon said:
I think that’s what’s wrong about video compressing. It’s not only about binary but a multiple sequenced scenes, a lot of things within the video are repeated data / patterns. I don’t think they are in it for compressing the binary but actually finding multiples and then compress it.
But like you said a server farm is more efficient due to cheap memory, I guess their approach to the market has to be the key to the solution.
