Comcast is aggressively positioning its Xfinity platform to reduce churn and engage its customers in ways similar to Netflix and Hulu. Elemental Technologies and thePlatform recently announced they were the technology providers for Comcast’s Xfinity TV application.
Elemental Technologies is a Portland, Oregon-based venture capital-funded company developing video encoders using nVidia GPUs. The founders came from Pixelworks, while other management team members have experience at Omneon and Motorola. Elemental has live and file-based products dedicated to high-quality, live, multiformat encoding and transcoding. Elemental claims the high floating point (GFLOP) performance of GPUs enables it to offer very high-quality video from a standard platform, enabling multiple resolutions of streaming output from a single server.Elemental has a significant number of trials and a few customer deployments in 2010 and is expecting a significant ramp up in unit shipments during 2011. Notable design wins include encoding for ABC’s iPad application and video behind MLB.com and the BigTen network. At the IBC (International Broadcasting Convention) in September, 2010, Elemental teamed with Microsoft to demonstrate live Microsoft Smooth streaming with 1080p 3D source video from Hamburg, Germany to the show floor in the Netherlands.
Thisannouncement from Comcastmarks Elemental's most significant announced deployment to date; one of many events signalling they are moving from start-up mode to revenue production mode.