Driver Pratap Gowda was bored. Every day, after dropping his techie boss Mahesh Subramanian at work, he waited endlessly till it was time for the long drive back home.
Mahesh asked him why he did not watch movies or serials on his smart phone. “It takes so much time to play and the images are just not clear,” complained Pratap. That got Mahesh thinking of how even with a fancy phone with 3G connection, videos were painful to watch, taking long minutes to buffer. That, in a way, was the trigger for StrmEasy, a video-delivery platform that enables people to watch high-quality videos and movies without too long a wait.
The platform has been created by Bangalore-based Touchfone, co-founded by Brahmayya Akella and Mahesh Subramanian. Touchfone is a start-up that enables video delivery across devices and networks. The company is incubated by the Evry group of Norway and Blume Ventures has invested in it. It is also part of the Accelerator Program of Microsoft Ventures, Bangalore.
A normal video is encoded and delivered on the device. What StrmEasy does is encode the data, compress it, package it and then deliver it. At the user end, it is unpackaged, uncompressed and decoded. Mahesh, also CTO of Touchfone, says the company provides custom players for applications built using StrmEasy platform; they handle the decompression and unpackaging of content and ensure excellent video quality. The company has tied up with telecom companies, device manufacturers (Nokia and Microsoft), content owners and television channels, powering their digital offering. They, in turn, pass on the technology to their users.
Mahesh says that the product can offer a 20 per cent savings on data consumption. For instance, if a video is of 20 MB size, StrmEasy reduces it to 16 MB. “Imagine the savings if you are streaming movies; it can run into hundreds of MBs,” he says.
As for Pratap, he’s a happy man. The 12 hours of waiting time flies past in a jiffy. Movies, serials, videos… he watches them seamlessly on his cell phone. “It’s a great feeling to watch your product make a difference every single day to someone’s life,” says Mahesh.
