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MHT Staff
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Tech Watch
ADC2 founders try again to boost speed of video transmissions
By Rodney H. Brown
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The founders of streaming video technology company ADC2 Technologies Corp. are taking a second pass at a startup aimed at improving the speed of online video by enhancing the compression technology that allows high-definition movies to get delivered in real-time to TV.
In 2006, Wentworth Institute of Technology assistant professor Angel Decegama and his partner Lewis Stoller launched TrueLight Technologies LLC based on an earlier version of the image processing technology Decegama developed. While that company didn’t make it, Stoller said, Decegama was able to reconstruct it to handle the new demands of HD video streaming. With that in hand, the technology veterans re-entered the startup world in 2008 with ADC2, based in Westford.
The technology is based on a concept that has been around since the 1980s called wavelet transformation processing, which actually manipulates the data in the individual image frames in a video. ADC2 applies its transformation to the original video file, before it gets encoded for streaming, so it is agnostic of any of the common video codecs.
That means that the process has to been undone at the end-user level, however. So the software needs to be in whatever device the user is using to get the on-demand HD movies — a set-top cable box, a DVR or a media center computer, for example.
“The No. 1 problem you have here is that you have to have it at both endpoints, and that is a challenge,” said Carl Stjernfeldt, general partner at Castile Ventures, who has invested in a number of media companies. “The problem is a Catch 22. If you are a provider, when do you decide to buy the technology to encode it? When you have a enough end users to decode it.”
In TrueLight, Decegama and Stoller were looking at serving the security market, where the need for streaming higher resolution and detailed video seemed to be obvious. After a couple of years trying to get adoption to pick up, the pair shelved the business model to go after the larger video-streaming market in entertainment, where everyone with a cable connection or a 3G cell phone is a potential customer. That would make ADC2’s potential customers companies like Comcast Corp., Motorola Inc. and AT&T Inc.
“We are beginning to be introduced to these companies,” Decegama said. “For example, AT&T asked us if we could move forward and would like to know how they can implement this in the most cost-effective way.”
AT&T got its first look at the technology this fall. It was interested enough to schedule a meeting with Decegama this month. Stoller said, “It interested a number of people there, including some in the government. They were actually talking about being in Afghanistan and sending compressed, high-definition video from the front lines to command.”
ADC2’s transformation process can take an HD video file that would normally be about 500 megabytes after a standard compression, and drop it to as little as 140 MB, or even down to 73 MB. At 140 MB, an HD movie could stream across a 1.5 Mbps broadband connection. At 73 MB, it could even stream wirelessly across a 0.75 Mbps 3G link, Decegama said.
Decegama is a former engineer at Lockheed Sanders, GTE Corp. and NCR Corp. Stoller founded ID Data Systems Inc., a maker of magnetic security-card technologies that he sold for an undisclosed amount in 1995. The two have been joined at ADC2 by India-based consultant Sunil Reddy, who is helping them raise their first round of funding.
The five-person company so far has been funded by the founders, but it is now looking for seed funding to finish its prototypes, which Decegama says could be done within a few months. “Once we have the prototypes demonstrated, we expect to get serious money — tens of millions of dollars,” Decegama said.
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