Sky takes stake in V-Nova

Sky has taken a minority stake in video compression specialist V-Nova. Sky’s Italian unit, which has used V-Nova’s technology since 2015, said it had provided £4.5 million in financing to the London-based compression outfit.

Sky Italia has used V-Nova’s compression technology for contribution and IPTV.

Guido Meardi

Sky said last April that it was using V-Nova’s Perseus codec on its IPTV platform. The company asked asked V-Nova to upgrade its headend and enable delivery to its set-tops with half the bitrate of existing MPEG-4 encoders to deliver services to ADSL customers.

According to V-Nova CEO Guido Meardi, the deployment enabled delivery of services that previously took over 8Mbps at under 4Mbps, allowing reach of the service to increase eightfold. Instead of the 10% of Sky homes with FTTH, the service could subsequently reach the 84% either with fibre or ADSL connections, most of which were under 10 Mbps.

Other investors in V-Nova include satellite operator Eutelsat, which took a stake in the company last September and struck an agreement to exclusively distribute V-Nova’s Perseus compression solutions in jointly defined offers for specific markets.

V-Nova recently acquired the global patent portfolio of video imaging outfit Faroudja Enterprise, which it said would further improve the efficiency of the Perseus codec.