Apple has acquired WaveOne, a Mountain View-based startup that has been developing AI algorithms for video compression. Cupertino has been mum about the purchase, but the deal reportedly closed in January, and WaveOne employees are said to have been absorbed into Apple’s machine learning groups. WaveOne’s codecs use machine learning to squeeze more picture out of less bandwidth, including optimizing for signal interruptions, so the picture doesn’t freeze or disappear, making it ideal for mobile. As Netflix and YouTube tout picture improvements, WaveOne could potentially advantage Apple TV+ and a mixed reality headset.

Apple has set June 5 as the date for WWDC23, and there is speculation that the company may debut its long-awaited headset at the venue, where it will likely have more to say about the WaveOne deal.

Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel founded WaveOne in 2016 after working at Facebook, where Bourdev was a founding member of the AI research unit, and both he and Rippel worked on the “computer vision team responsible for content moderation, visual search and feed ranking,” according to TechCrunch.

“WaveOne sought to bring the power of AI to bear on compressing video for streaming over networks where it’s necessary to cut down the size of video streams in order to reduce latency for better viewing experiences,” writes SiliconAngle.

The company’s hardware agnostic approach circumvents the usual paradigm of compressing on the server-side and decompressing on the client end, which works, but requires hardware built-into the display device, which makes improvements slow to propagate.

“WaveOne’s main innovation was a ‘content-aware’ video compression and decompression algorithm that could run on the AI accelerators built into many phones and an increasing number of PCs,” TechCrunch writes, explaining how using artificial intelligence for scene and object detection, WaveOne’s algorithms “could essentially ‘understand’ a video frame, allowing it to, for example, prioritize faces at the expense of other elements within a scene to save bandwidth.”

WaveOne said its approach “could reduce the size of video files by up to half, and those gains were even better on more complex scenes,” SiliconAngle writes, noting that “even small amounts of gains in bandwidth can significantly improve viewer experience.”

It could also save the signal provider money on bandwidth, and “enable services like Apple TV+ to deliver higher resolutions and frame rates depending on the type of content being streamed,” TechCrunch says.

Apple is making a fashionably late entrance to the AI party. The company had an employees-only AI summit in February and the only news to leak out of it was Bloomberg  speculating Apple may unveil its new headset at WWDC23.

Last week, Gizmodo reported that “Apple simply isn’t working on any AI that’s ‘reminiscent’ of current chatbots,” noting “nothing about ChatGPT came up at the company’s annual AI summit, though that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have plans cooking.”