It's being reported today that Apple has acquired WaveOne that was developing AI algorithms for compressing video. In September 2022 a detailed report surfaced about  WaveOne's research that proposed a new Machine Learning-based algorithm for video-coding, learned end-to-end for the low-latency mode.

While Apple wouldn't confirm the acquisition, Co-Founder of WaveOne Oren Ripple's LinkedIn Profile lists Ripple as an Apple Machine Learning Engineer from Vancouver Canada. His starting date was noted as February 2023.  

The former VP of sales at WaveOne Bob Stankosh's LinkedIn page comes right out and says WaveOne "acquired by Apple."

According to TechCrunch, "WaveOne’s main innovation was a 'content-aware' video compression and decompression algorithm that could run on the AI accelerators built into many phones and an increasing number of PCs. Leveraging AI-powered scene and object detection, the startup’s technology could essentially “understand” a video frame — allowing it to, for example, prioritize faces at the expense of other elements within a scene to save bandwidth.

So what might Apple want with an AI-powered video codec? Well, the obvious answer is more efficient streaming. Even minor improvements in video compression could save on bandwidth costs, or enable services like Apple TV+ to deliver higher resolutions and framerates depending on the type of content being streamed.

YouTube’s already doing this. Last year, Alphabet’s DeepMind adapted a machine learning algorithm originally developed to play board games to the problem of compressing YouTube videos, leading to a 4% reduction in the amount of data the video-sharing service needs to stream to users.

Perhaps we’ll see similar innovations from the Apple-owned WaveOne team soon.