IMAX Corp. said it acquired streaming video technology company SSIMWave for $21 million.

IMAX said the deal will enable it to deliver higher-quality video images on any screen, providing new revenue opportunities and bolstering its position in entertainment technology. 

Through its SSIMPlus products, SSIMWave helps the streaming industry solve video quality problems, earning it Emmy and NAB awards. SSIMWave’s technology — which uses artificial intelligence to replicate the human eye — helps services assess video quality at sale, minimize drop-offs and reduce distribution expenses.

“SSIMWave is doing revolutionary work at the intersection of human visual perception and image enhancement technology. By putting the power of our global brand behind their award-winning engineering team and product suite, IMAX takes a big step toward a new horizon in our ability to deliver the best images for any creator, across every screen,” said IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond. “In the near-term, SSIMWAVE brings to IMAX new, SaaS-based revenue and a world-class client roster that tightly aligns with some of our strongest, most successful content partnerships.”

Four of the world’s top-ten streaming media companies — including The Walt Disney Co., Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery — currently work with with SSIMWave to optimize video. Many of those are also among IMAX’s long-standing content partners.

The acquisition is expected to be accretive in 2023 and have no material impact in 2022, IMAX said. 

“Viewers and content creators expect more from video experiences. By joining IMAX, SSIMWAVE will be even better positioned to preserve creators’ intent and enable engaging, differentiated viewing experiences to millions of users across platforms,” said Dr. Abdul Rehman, CEO of SSIMWave. “We’re excited to join IMAX and tap into its global scale and expertise as more streamers turn to SSIMWave to ensure the best viewing experiences while reducing bandwidth costs.”

Under terms of the agreement, SSMIWave’s owners can receive a $4 million earnout based on the unit’s operating and financial performance.

Rehman will continue to run SSMIWave as a subsidiary of Imax. All of the company’s other founders, management and executives will remain after the acquisition is complete, SSIMWave said. 

SSIMWave was founded at Ontario’s University of Waterloo in 2013, based on the structural similarity algorithm for assessing visibility errors. The company has raised $1.6 million in equity financing, with the last round occurring in June 2019. The company has 11 equity investors, plus Fed Dev, which provided a $4.2 million (Canadian) interest-free loan. 

Investors include the University of Waterloo, OCI and Wilfrid Laurier University & Garage Capital. ■

Netflix recently encountered a  2.5 hour weekend outage (a weekend outage!), ultimately attributed to streaming issues. It was occurring just one day after the company made its new Marvel TV series Luke Cage available to stream, and loyal customers were less than pleased.

This outage, though unfortunate for Netflix, brings video quality to the forefront of industry conversation and importance, especially as we continue to see a massive shift from linear broadcast to over-the-top (OTT) streaming video. Even Google is hopping on the OTT bandwagon, with the rumored launch of its Unplugged service.

Arguably, one of the greatest challenges in this transition from linear broadcast to OTT is improving the consistency of the viewing experience, with current industry concerns around subscriber churn driving much of that conversation. This evolutionary challenge can be conquered -- providers just need to prioritize good quality or risk losing viewers to a competing service.

However, ensuring quality can be tough. There are a variety of analytics tools that take the “final inspection” approach, measuring the playback quality on the user device. Unfortunately, this approach merely identifies the defect at the same time the customer experiences it! The poor quality gets to the customer, and the best we can do with this “reactive” tool is identify apology opportunities. And some in the industry are bypassing even this basic level of monitoring, relying on social media to get their quality metrics.

Measuring the quality of the content and its preparation for downstream delivery is just as important as content distribution. Video providers must consider every part of their infrastructure, anticipate failures, and have tools and plans in place to detect and address them.

The multi-vendor streaming pipeline is complex; the first step is often identifying that there is a problem, and separating the known-good elements from the suspected ones. A proactive, end-to-end operational and behavioral correlation analytics architecture is the best insurance against failures occurring, and enables the fastest response when they do occur.

As indicated by the vast ecosystem of players in the SVOD industry, consumers now have access to hundreds of programs at their fingertips, distributed by channels and networks at a similar price from a variety of providers. Thus, quality is now of the utmost importance and a key facet of customer acquisition and retention.

End viewer quality is truly an end-to-end game, requiring strong defense (24/7/365 monitoring) and a focused offense that provides the real-time visibility required to know when there are quality issues and provide the information organizations need to address those issues in the most efficient and effective manner possible. Companies like Netflix and the future YouTube Unplugged offering from Google need to get this right to keep customers from abandoning subscriptions and pledging loyalty to the next best offering.

Kurt Michel is senior director of marketing at IneoQuest

After the launch of YouTube Red, Richard Lawson of Vanity Fairdeclared, “YouTube videos are, by and large, hot stinky garbage. But we watch them, because they are free garbage. And we love free things!”

This deliberately incendiary comment doesn’t take into account the fact that value itself is subjective, and that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. YouTube and its more than a billion users and four billion video views daily are, in many ways, proof of that. It is the viewer’s experience that video content providers like YouTube need to care about.

Despite being delivered through technology, YouTube content resonates so strongly with viewers quite simply because it speaks to aspects of the human condition. In what other single place in the real or virtual world can a person access content that can make them laugh, cry, learn or experience? To consumers, the quality of their viewing experience is just as important as what they on watching.  On YouTube and other OTT properties, just like in the real world, viewers want their experiences to be immersive.

They don’t want to wait for experiences to start or keep going. Viewers have come to expect a “broadcast quality” video experience and are usually disappointed if they don’t get one. In fact, 51% of consumers we surveyed who watch online or streaming video have experienced rage as a result poor video quality. The accessibility, continuity and quality of our experiences matter just as much as, or in many cases, perhaps more than, the content itself. 

This is why when T-Mobile launched its new Binge On program, YouTube wasn’t happy. The program prevents T-Mobile subscribers from streaming HD video and in exchange allows them to stream video from Netflix, HBO Go and a number of other services without having it count towards their data usage. As a result, YouTube’s video is being downgraded to around 480p quality. A YouTube spokesman told the Wall Street Journal, “Reducing data charges can be good for users, but it doesn’t justify throttling all video services, especially without explicit user consent.”

And at CES 2016, Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s chief business officer, again proved the company’s commitment to quality. HeannouncedYouTube will soon support HDR videos as well. HDR improves video image quality and creates a more realistic, natural image. It also produces richer colors, improves contrast and enables viewers to see detail in dark, shadowy scenes.

At its most basic level, if a viewer can’t access the content, and have the experience when they want to, then it doesn’t exist to them. By the same token, if an online experience is constantly interrupted by buffering, stuttering, pixilation or drop-off, the value of the experience is diminished. In the worst cases, a positive experience can turn into a negative one, creating a damaging connection with the content. This is what YouTube is trying to prevent.

This paradigm extends beyond YouTube to just about every type of content or experience. No one would go to a theater to watch a movie that buffered, just as no one would read a book with pages torn out, or see a play where the lights flickered. These potentially positive experiences could turn into negative ones, and the implications for those who create the content – whether they are filmmakers, authors, playwrights or YouTube stars with iPhones – could be dire.

In the case of YouTube, to define the entirety of its offerings as garbage misses the point. The statement devalues its content, but also, to an extent, its viewers. In a way, YouTube’s value lies in making so much content so accessible. YouTube breaks down experience barriers and quality control backs this up. It gives us things we value in a way that enriches our lives. I’d hardly call that garbage.

--Diane Tarr-Smith is a strategic marketing consultant at IneoQuest Technologies, a provider of video analytics and service assurance solutions