The Startup Forum at IBC2017 will showcase 75 startups from around the world, providing them with the opportunity to pitch to leading investors and executives.
The Forum is a pre-selected networking hub to connect investors and media houses with global, agile startup and scaleup companies through networking and partnership bonding.
The new initiative will feature a deal room for scheduled speed-meetings, an informal networking area, theatre for keynote speakers, pitches and sponsored sessions and an executive dinner to bring together high-level attendees prior to the event.
Attending the forum are innovative startup companies that are leading the future across the digital media landscape.
In the first of a two-part series, we hear from five of the startups.
InterfereX Communications
USA
InterfereX accelerates OTT Video Content delivery to enable a high-quality user experience with patent pending technology.
What makes your startup company stand out from your competitors?
InterfereX have developed a novel product, called CLRifex, to deliver video content over multiple Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) simultaneously. This parallel path delivery is extremely efficient and can substantially improve the data throughput, overcome buffering issues, and provide fully redundant content delivery paths.
How important is staying abreast of technological changes to your business strategy?
Keeping up-to-date with the changes in the OTT Video space is critical. The industry is rapidly evolving into cloud based internet services and we are constantly working to understand the latest innovations to make sure our business is well positioned.
Where do you see your business in five years time?
InterfereX have an exciting five year roadmap, our novel products are initially targeted at video on demand and live streaming, however, the majority of Internet traffic will soon be video so there are lots of new applications for our solution to social media, websites with rich content, and streaming of AR/VR content.
Filmstro
UK
Innovative Audio Format for creative media and content creators. Music Solution for Broadcast, Online, Film & Games.
What makes your startup company stand out from your competitors?
We are one of the only companies providing ‘adaptive’ music for filmmakers and game developers in plug-ins that work directly inside their preferred workstations (Video Editors for Filmmakers and Game Engines for Game Developers).
How important is staying abreast of technological changes to your business strategy?
Fundamental. We’re working with the latest web tech and audio tech to maintain our advantage and keep our offering fresh for our customers; constantly pushing the boundaries of what can be done in the music for media space.
Where do you see your business in five years time?
We would like to be the de-facto ‘adaptive’ music format for Game Developers and Filmmakers. We see partnerships with other libraries and collaboration with musicians around the world.
PhenixP2P Inc
USA
PhenixP2P is revolutionising content delivery with PCast™, the world’s first and only real-time content delivery network that can scale to millions of concurrent viewers, while maintaining less than 0.5 seconds of end-to-end latency.
What makes your startup company stand out from your competitors?
Competitors in the live streaming space primarily use HLS and typically have 10-60+ seconds of latency/delay in their streams. They are able to scale to large audiences, but lack the real-time capability to create an interactive experience for participants. On the other hand, while real-time competitors provide infrastructure enabling real-time interaction, they are limited in scale. Such platforms can reach, at most, a few hundred participants.
As the first and only company of its kind, Phenix’s PCast TM real-time CDN can reach millions of concurrent viewers while maintaining less than 0.5 seconds of latency. PCast TM consists of several highly proprietary algorithms with the goal of maximising throughput and minimising latency.
Furthermore, our optional peer-assisted Proximity Multicast TM feature facilitates even larger scale viewing, enhances quality by avoiding networking bottlenecks, and significantly lowers operating bandwidth costs for its customers.
How important is staying abreast of technological changes to your business strategy?
It is essential to understand the next “new” thing in terms of technology, as the space changes so frequently. As an example, both VR and AI have generated billions in investment capital, but the adoption by the masses has been slow. Thus, it is important to see what is coming but not react too quickly in case things fizzle out.
We have always prided ourselves as being ahead of the curve - we have been planning for the mass adoption of real-time to take the place of “live” for several years, and it is now falling into place. In fact, our CEO, Stefan Birrer, wrote his dissertation at Northwestern on live streaming back on 2002 so, we have been well ahead of this trend.
Where do you see your business in five years time?
Our goal is to become the de facto platform for all companies looking to, or currently streaming content over the internet. Facebook Live, YouTube Live, sports leagues, governing bodies, media companies, adtech, education platforms, auction sites and webinar companies all stream “live” with anywhere from 10-60+ seconds of latency. We strive to convert these “live” solutions to our new real-time standard.
Our technology has two elements that give us long-term sustainability which will allow us to achieve our goals: our platform is modular so, we are able to build new features at any time that further enhances the delivery of content in real-time; and, our technology is steeped in academia with ties to Northwestern - our lead scientist, who works with us on a regular basis, is the mentor of our CEO so we are able to integrate the latest research into the building of our platform.
Exponenta
Spain
Exponenta predicts virality for unpublished texts and provides recommendations on how to get exponential shares and audiences.
What makes your startup company stand out from your competitors?
The absolute majority of journalists and marketers are still using gut feeling to decide which content to create, to publish and to promote. 10,000 virality factors have been studied to understand better what influences the popularity of the content. With Exponenta’s patentable algorithms we leave less room for intuition.
How important is staying abreast of technological changes to your business strategy?
We work with the latest tech. Exponenta wouldn’t be possible even a couple of years ago. We follow very carefully what’s going on with deep learning and NLP. Meanwhile, we develop complex predictive models by our own.
Where do you see your business in five years time?
We aim to become a standard AI tool for any content creator. Exponenta improves content in real-time by making it more readable, trustworthy and relevant for the target audience. An indispensable instrument for publishers, ad agencies, and brands.
Valossa
Finland
Valossa created and artificial intelligence (AI) platform that understands video like a human does. It gives you metadata that enables more intelligent analytics, content management tools and methods of monetising video.
What makes your startup company stand out from your competitors?
Valossa provides unparalleled AI capabilities to capture new value of videos. Valossa gives you the most comprehensive video understanding AI to this day - going beyond the capabilities of traditional visual recognition systems, and tools to manage video data through a simple, single service.
How important is staying abreast of technological changes to your business strategy?
As a technology-driven company we are constantly developing better and more advanced ways to serve our customers. Our goal is to provide state-of-the-art AI solutions that can bring efficiency and competitive advantage for our business customers. That is why it is very important to keep abreast of what is needed and what is valuable.
Where do you see your business in five years time?
We see that Artificial Intelligence and automation will be the driver of growth and development. Valossa wants to be part of the revolution that advances in AI technology will bring to the industry. So, in the coming years Valossa will continue helping companies leverage AI to accelerate their development and address broad video analysis use cases.
Next week we hear from Promethean.tv, Choicely, LiveWeatherViews, Appiness and Source Digital
The Startup Forum will be held on Sunday 17 September in association with Media Honeypot
No comments yet