Companies Opt for Rovi HEVC Beta Program and Access to MainConcept HEVC SDK

Rovi Corporation, a provider of digital entertainment, revealed that more than 50 companies in digital media creation, transcoding,and delivery, have signed up to participate in its HEVC Beta Program.

The program was launched this year for participants to gain access to the MainConcept HEVC SDK and evaluate the new compression standard. The program will impact video distribution and consumption, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) or H.265 and is expected to offer double the compression efficiency of H.264 and reduce storage and bandwidth costs, as well as support higher resolutions.

Early beta program participants include Castis, Wohler Technologies, Marex Broadcast Systems, a provider in software design and development related to the broadcast and computer-based multimedia display, and MTI (News - Alert) Film, a solutions provider for the post-production industry.

“As a market leader, with a world-renowned video and audio codec library, we have used Rovi’s MainConcept SDK for a number of years to enhance our solution and foster compatibility with the latest formats and codecs,” stated Jongkwan Park, CMO, Castis. “Many of our top-tier customers are now inquiring about HEVC, so we are pleased to be collaborating with Rovi to help address that interest and enable telco and cable TV customers to deliver more high-quality video services while at the same time managing bandwidth congestion.”

“We view the positive response to our beta program and the variety of companies evaluating our MainConcept HEVC SDK as a strong indication that the industry is ready to rapidly embrace the latest compression standard,” commented Kanaan Jemili, SVP, Product Management, Rovi Corporation. “We view HEVC as one of the keys to enabling our customers to improve the consumer entertainment experience, and so the MainConcept SDK is one element of a far broader development effort that is designed to help accelerate market adoption.”

DivX Video Service, announced separately, is an end-to-end video solution for high-quality multiscreen video delivery to integrate with TV Everywhere and over-the-top entertainment services. Building upon core DivX video technologies and DRM, as well as MainConcept professional encoders, DivX Video Service offers components for managing the video distribution chain from creation and secure delivery to multi-screen playback. This provides customers with consistent and interoperable HEVC-enable video services.

DivX Video Service is available now and supports a range of entertainment distribution models including digital downloads and connected-device streaming. Later this year, Rovi plans to update DivX Video Service to support HEVC/H.265, the latest compression standard set to enable the broader availability of HD video and delivery of 4K entertainment.

Rovi also unveiled MainConcept SDK 9.7, an update to its codec library.