Elemental Technologies Announces Elemental(TM) Live, the Industry's First GPU-Accelerated Live Video Streaming Solution

PORTLAND, Ore., April 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Elemental Technologies, the leading provider of massively parallel video processing solutions, today announced Elemental Live, a GPU-accelerated, enterprise-class video processing system that provides content distributors with video and audio encoding for live streaming. Ideal for broadcasters, online video platforms and other new media providers, Elemental Live delivers four times the performance of competitive CPU-only solutions at half the price. Elemental will unveil Elemental Live in booth SL4529 on the NAB 2010 show floor in Las Vegas April 12-15.

Elemental Live drives immediate business value by speeding delivery of video content to the consumer and improving the monetization of content for the provider. An industry-leading combination of superior video quality, flexibility and ease-of-use makes Elemental Live a powerful solution for streaming live content to virtually any target device. The system provides greater density than other transcoding solutions for live events with the ability to encode four simultaneous 1080p output streams or up to eight 720p output streams in a single appliance. By creating all the required streams for a live event in a single system, Elemental Live eliminates the complexity of multi-appliance solutions while dramatically reducing the total cost of ownership.

"Elemental Live's immediate ease of use and integration was a breath of fresh air," said Jim DeChant, Director of Technical Operations at News-Press & Gazette Broadcasting. "Our evaluation of Elemental Live demonstrates that it can provide critical density in terms of concurrent outputs per system, allowing us to deliver a high-quality adaptive solution to our viewers at a very low cost."

"Content providers are making a concerted move to live streaming using adaptive bit rate protocols. Given the number of video streams these architectures require, current enterprise encoding solutions can't keep pace in terms of raw performance, usability or total cost of ownership," said Sam Blackman, CEO and chairman of Elemental Technologies. "With its high performance and throughput, Elemental Live not only produces high quality video for live streaming, it can replace multiple CPU-only encoding systems at a fraction of the price while reducing power consumption, cooling requirements and the overall solution footprint."

Elemental Live delivers the high-quality, high-efficiency performance required for current and future live streaming applications. With unprecedented ease of integration and management, Elemental Live fits easily into any existing video content creation and delivery workflow. An intuitive web-based interface with real-time operator controls drives a seamless user experience and a REST interface allows content providers to quickly integrate Elemental Live into their workflow and execute command and control through a simple XML-based API.

"Live video is clearly driving one of the most dramatic growth segments in the technology marketplace, and content producers and CDNs as well as mobile device developers have embraced the business opportunity while the technology infrastructure plays catch-up," noted Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "By leveraging the power of GPUs for live video encoding, Elemental Live represents a significant step forward in the quality, throughput and manageability that content providers can expect from a single system."

Key features of Elemental Live include:

• Complete Adaptive Bit Rate Support – Create streams for any device with full support for Flash Media Server, Microsoft Smooth Streaming and Apple HTTP Live Streaming, all from a single system.
• Broad Input and Flexible Output Support – Ingest multiple inputs from IP, HD-SDI or SDI with support for multiple audio tracks; use the most efficient codecs and containers for today's streaming media.
• Proprietary Video Algorithms – Algorithms designed exclusively for the GPU drive intelligent video processing and effects, saving valuable computational cycles and improving video output quality.
• Real-Time User Controls – Easy-to-use start and stop controls save editing cycles and allow for instant posting of on-demand event replays.
• Interoperability and Redundancy – One-click integration available for the most popular CDNs; publish to multiple endpoints simultaneously for redundancy.
• Future Ready – Designed to support CableLabs® compliance for streaming to cable set-top boxes, new standards such as HTML 5, and encoding for stereoscopic content.

Elemental will debut Elemental Live at NAB in Las Vegas April 12-15 with a four-screen demonstration that features simultaneous real-time encoding of multiple video streams targeted to mobile, tablet, web and HDTV platforms. Elemental Live will be generally available in May, 2010. Pricing is available upon request.

About Elemental

Elemental Technologies is the leading provider of massively parallel video processing solutions for enterprise video customers. Elemental's products use off-the-shelf, programmable graphics processing units (GPUs) for compute-intensive video processing and conversion tasks. The product line is ideal for digital media workflows that require video encoding for Internet and mobile delivery, faster-than-real-time transcoding, or support for adaptive bit rate distribution. Elemental's innovative solutions deliver unprecedented price/performance advantages to a variety of customers including broadcasters, online video platforms and content delivery networks. Founded in 2006, Elemental is headquartered in Portland, Oregon. To learn more about Elemental, visit www.elementaltechnologies.com.

SOURCE Elemental Technologies