| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Video software |
| Founded | 2006 |
| Headquarters | Portland, Oregon (incorporated in Delaware) United States |
| Key people | Samuel S. Blackman, CEO and co-founder Jesse J. Rosenzweig, CTO and co-founder Brian G. Lewis, Chief Architect and co-founder Lyman Potts, COO |
| Employees | 46 (2011) |
| Website | elementaltechnologies.com |
Elemental Technologies, Inc. is a software company headquartered in Portland, Oregon that specializes in providing massively parallel processing (MPP) solutions. Founded in August 2006, Elemental has focused on using the capabilities of graphics processing units (GPUs) to perform video encoding, decoding, transcoding, and pixel processing tasks on commodity hardware.[1] The company calls its core technology the Elemental video engine. Media and entertainment companies using Elemental products include ABC, Avail-TVN, Big Ten Network, CBS Interactive, Comcast, National Geographic, News-Press & Gazette, Oceanic Time Warner, PBS, QVC, TF1, VMMA and WRN Broadcast.
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Elemental was founded in 2006 by three engineers formerly of the semiconductor company Pixelworks: Chairman and CEO Sam Blackman, CTO Jesse Rosenzweig, and Chief Architect Brian Lewis.[2] Tripling in size since 2008, Elemental has moved its headquarters twice to its current location on SW Fifth Avenue in downtown Portland and built a worldwide salesforce headed by VP of Sales Daniel Marshall.
Elemental received its initial investments in 2007 in the amount of $1.05 million from three angel funds: the Seattle-based Alliance of Angels, the Oregon Angel Fund, and the Bend Venture Conference.[3] In July 2008, Elemental announced it had closed its first round of venture capital financing, receiving $5.5 million in investments from General Catalyst Partners of Boston, Massachusetts and Voyager Capital of Seattle, Washington. In July 2010, Elemental raised an additional $7.5 million in Series B financing. Steamboat Ventures, a venture capital firm affiliated with The Walt Disney Company, joined existing venture funds General Catalyst and Voyager Capital in the financing round.
In November 2010, Elemental announced its partnership with Amazon Web Services with technology that runs on Amazon's EC2 Cluster GPU Instances. Elemental Accelerated Cloud Transcoding (Elemental ACT™) is a family of services that provides transcoding capacity in the cloud using clustered graphics processors. These services make flexible cloud-based transcoding accessible to professional video content providers and distributors.
With the consumption of live video rising at a rapid rate, in April 2010, Elemental introduced its newest enterprise product, Elemental Live, a GPU-accelerated, enterprise-class video processing system that provides content distributors with video and audio encoding for live streaming to new media platforms.
Key features include:
Elemental Live made its debut at NAB in Las Vegas April 12–15, 2010, with a four-screen demonstration featuring simultaneous real-time encoding of multiple video streams targeted to mobile, tablet, web and HDTV platforms.
A complete overview of Elemental Live can be obtained by downloading the company's white paper
Citing the explosion of online video growth, Elemental announced in May 2009 that it was taking its core technology to the enterprise level with a product called Elemental Server.[4] Commercially released in November 2009, it is the first video server appliance to utilize the graphics processing unit for video on demand (VOD) transcoding. The company claims its performance equals that of seven dual quad-core CPU servers.[5] Other potential benefits include conversion speed, reduced power usage, less physical space, and overall cost, which is reported to be less than half of a CPU server.[6] This is significant for content creators and distributors of online and mobile video, such as Broadcast studios, online video platforms and content delivery networks, who use transcoding appliances in their server facilities. Elemental has announced that several companies, including Brightcove, have participated in the beta program.
Released on October 16, 2008, Elemental Accelerator for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 renders Blu-ray quality AVC/H.264 files using the GPU. The plug-in offloads H.264 encoding while the CPU performs other necessary decoding functions. Previously known as the RapiHD Accelerator, Elemental Accelerator is compatible with the NVIDIA Quadro line of graphics cards, which are positioned as "optimized for Adobe Creative Suite 4."[7] This has received some criticism as users have questioned why the plug-in, which uses Elemental's core technology, does not work with all CUDA-enabled cards. However, NVIDIA, which owns the Elemental Accelerator distribution rights, has defended this by stating that the Quadro line has the best price for performance of all their cards.
In June 2009, Elemental Accelerator was made available for the Mac Operating System and as a standalone software plug-in. Up to this point, the product was Windows-only and could only be acquired upon purchase of a graphics card.
On October 23, 2008, Elemental released Badaboom, a consumer media converter, in partnership with NVIDIA Corporation. Badaboom was initially designed to run exclusively on NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPUs. Support for Intel's hybrid CPU/GPU processor, code named Sandy Bridge, was added to Badaboom in early 2011. Badaboom uses Elemental's video engine to transcode video files from several formats, including MPEG2, H.264, HDV, AVCHD, and RAW, into the H.264 format for devices such as the iPod, iPhone, and Sony PSP. The manufacturer claims that the converter enables the user of an extremely high-end graphics card to transcode low-quality video up to 18 times faster than the worst CPU-only implementation.[8]
Elemental had previously planned to release both a standard and professional version of Badaboom. However, as specifications became delayed, the company announced it would be releasing only a standard version, potentially adding professional features over time.[9] This received mixed feedback from those who hoped for enhanced capabilities immediately. As it stands today, Badaboom is suited best for consumers who are converting videos to play on portable devices.