PlayStation Acquires UK-Based iSIZE - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 November 2023 / 7,531 Views
Sony Interactive Entertainment has announced it has entered an agreement to acquire UK-based iSIZE.
"We are thrilled to announce that Sony Interactive Entertainment has entered into an agreement to acquire iSIZE, a UK-based company specializing in deep learning for video delivery," reads the announcement post.
"iSIZE builds AI-powered solutions to deliver bitrate savings and quality improvements for the media and entertainment industry. The acquisition provides SIE with significant expertise in applying machine learning to video processing, which will benefit a range of our R&D efforts as well as our video and streaming services.
"Founded in 2016 and based in London, iSIZE has a team of talented engineers and technical experts who have developed a suite of software solutions to optimize video. For example, the company built an AI-based perceptual preprocessing solution that allows conventional, third-party encoders to produce higher quality video at a significantly lower bitrate.
"We look forward to welcoming the iSIZE team to SIE."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Interesting. Seems like a smart choice.
So Sony has increased in SIZE sorry I couldn't help it.
Sony getting more serious about Cloud streaming I guess :P
It's not just a technology that benefits cloud streaming.
One of the largest storage space hogs is video.
Using A.I to produce substantial bitrate savings and reduce file sizes could be a big-deal in the future... Especially as we will likely never have a successor to Blu-Ray... And NAND being extremely volatile in it's price.
Consider this idea... Sony's next-gen Playstation 6 using it's SSD compression technology with an A.I processing block that can analyze pieces of data and optimize the compression algorithm to fit with the data sets and thus achieving higher compression ratios compared to a one-size-fits-all approach like they do currently. - The current method is fantastic at compressing/decompressing some types of data, but other types it's rather poor at handling, this would potentially resolve that issue.
Interesting, The title is misleading though, the article is stating Sony as the acquirer not Playstation. Do any info suggest this team will work under the PlayStation Group?
The article references SIE, which is the subsidiary of Sony which operates Playstation brand. The only subsidiary with Playstation in it's corporate name is Playstation Productions which just coordinates film and TV adaptations of Playstation IP. So there is no corporate entity named Playstation or Playstation Group which might purchase a developer like this. Playstation Studios is a division of SIE, but that does not confer a distinct corporate identity which would change the entity actually doing the purchasing.
I see, thanks, then it's even more interesting I thought I tech like this would have wider objective then just video game for Sony Since they own a lot of movies and series and also own Crunchyroll but looks like it's use will be way more targeted to video game streaming.
Will they just lay everyone off when they don't make an instant mega hit that makes them billions? This seems to be the new normal in the gaming industry
An ai video processing mega hit?
This company doesn't make games.
