Digital Rapids is a company focused on the convergence of video and network technologies. Video is the most powerful communication tool available, it is everywhere we look, from our living rooms to our board rooms, to the airports, public transportation, and even large screen electronic displays on the side of buildings and alongside our major highways. Next generation technologies will place video in our PDAs, and in the cell phones we carry with us every day.

Today NBC is making its fall lineup available to users of PocketPC powered PDAs.
The military is using wireless transmission of video technology to monitor its troops live on the battlefield.
Educators are using video to expand their classrooms from 10s and hundreds of students to hundreds of thousands and even millions of students.

The potential market for network based video distribution has been estimated at $2.5B by 2005, this represents growth of an order of magnitude (10x) over the current market size. This is for the internet market alone and does not take into account the massive replacement of existing tape duplication and distribution, digital archiving, and data mining of mass libraries of video (the city of Toronto has more than 100,000 tapes in its library alone). The fundamental appeal of network accessed and distributed digital video is the efficiency of storage, and the cost effective and pervasive nature of its distribution. Put simply, network based video distribution systems can reach every consumer device and geography from home computers and PDAs to those building size billboards. In theory it has no boundaries, it has no schedule, the content can change dynamically, economically, and instantaneously.

There are several key technological challenges that must be met for this industry to reach its critical mass. One of these challenges is the myriad of standards and formats used for distribution and playback to all of these devices. There are multiple standards in place today including MPEG, Microsoft Windows Media, and Real Networks Real video to name a few. There is also the question of efficiency. In the networking and storage market, efficiency is measured in terms of individual bytes (traditional analog systems charge based on time). Even a modest gain in video compression efficiency can mean substantial savings in storage and transmission costs.

Digital Rapids has developed a set of technologies to address these challenges and has developed them into a product line that spans the market from the individual artist to the large enterprise. Our technologies leverage our years of experience in video broadcasting and high performance software development but were developed specifically for this new market opportunity. Our expertise lies in two areas, hardware based video pre-processing and real-time software based video encoding.

Our hardware based video pre-processing technology comes from our years of experience in the broadcast video market where we set the standard for others to follow. With our purpose built hardware solutions we are able to deliver video quality that is far superior to that used today in traditional broadcasting. We do this through our advanced de-interlacing and noise reduction technology that removes analog artifacts from video, dropouts, and externally sourced noise and delivers consistent high quality video into the network. The benefit of this is pristine video that is up to 30% more efficient to compress, is higher in quality than any other solution, and uses less storage and bandwidth resulting in direct cost savings and higher quality deliverables for our customers. Sony has evaluated the quality of our video pre-processing and has chosen to incorporate Digital Rapids server systems into Sony based broadcast solutions.

Our second key technology is our scalable software architecture. We have developed a proprietary, real-time video stream management and processing technology that allows us to take multiple live video inputs and encode them into multiple digital standards and formats in real-time using off the shelf PCs. The benefit of this is that content needs to be authored once for standard television broadcast and our software can manage the real-time processing of that content into formats suitable for any device regardless of format or bandwidth availability. The result is real-time delivery of optimized, high quality content to any target viewing device and audience. Our proprietary software can scale in installation size from individual streams of video in and out of the system for simple applications to hundreds or thousands of channels of video into and out of our systems in real-time for applications with massive distribution. The efficiency of our solution is only limited by the processing power (CPU) of the systems in which it is installed. Our software architecture has attracted attention from Microsoft and IBM to name a few and is currently the only solution certified for installation on IBM servers.

Digital Rapids is positioning itself as the leading manufacturer of video encoding solutions to consumers and as a key technology provider and OEM partner for network based video transmission and video storage solution companies.