AWS Elemental

AWS Elemental, formerly known as Elemental Technologies, is a software company headquartered in Portland, Oregon and owned by Amazon Web Services that specializes in multiscreen video. Founded in August 2006, Elemental creates software that performs video encoding, decoding, transcoding, and pixel processing tasks on commodity hardware for adaptive bitrate streaming of video over IP networks. Elemental video processing software runs in turnkey, cloud-based and virtualized deployment models. The company has offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, China, Russia, India and Brazil.
History.
Elemental was founded in 2006 by three engineers formerly of the semiconductor company Pixelworks: Sam Blackman (CEO), Jesse Rosenzweig (CTO), and Brian Lewis.
In July 2012, Elemental products supported the broadcast of the 2012 Summer Olympics on internet devices for media companies including the BBC, Eurosport, Terra Networks and others.
In September 2013, Elemental was named to the Silicon Forest top 25 by "The Oregonian". The company ranked #24 among the region's largest technology companies.
In October 2013, Elemental provided live 4K HEVC video streaming of the 2013 Osaka Marathon in a workflow designed by K-Opticom, a telecommunications operator in Japan.
In April 2017, the company changed its name from Elemental Technologies to AWS Elemental.
In August 2017, Sam Blackman, the company's CEO and co-founder, died suddenly from cardiac arrest at the age of 41.
Feared security compromise.
In 2015, during security testing conducted as a prelude to a possible acquisition by Amazon, it was reported that some Elemental servers contained chips from Chinese manufacturing subcontractors that allowed backdoor access. According to a U.S. government investigation, the chips were inserted by a People’s Liberation Army unit.
These reports were denied by all of the companies involved, no such chips were ever found, and the acquisition proceeded without further incident.
Funding.
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.
In July 2008, Elemental announced it had closed its first round of venture capital financing, receiving $7.1 million, which included investments from General Catalyst Partners of Boston, Massachusetts and Voyager Capital of Seattle, Washington.
In 2009, Elemental formed a partnership with In-Q-Tel - the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental servers were subsequently used in various secure capacities, including by the United States Department of Defense, the United States Navy, NASA, the United States Congress and the Department of Homeland Security.
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 May 2012, Elemental closed its Series C financing for $13 million from Norwest Venture Partners.
In December 2014, Elemental closed its Series D financing for $14.5 million led by Telstra and Sky.
In September 2015, Elemental was acquired by Amazon Web Services, for an estimated $350 million.
Products.
AWS Media Services.
In November 2017, Amazon Web Services announced AWS Media Services, a group of five services that let video providers create scalable video offerings in the cloud. Based on AWS Elemental video solutions, these cloud services let customers build video workflows for both broadcast and streaming content. AWS Media Services include the following individual services:
AWS Elemental MediaConvert transcodes file-based video content.
AWS Elemental MediaLive encodes live video for televisions or connected devices.
AWS Elemental MediaPackage prepares and secures live video streams for delivery to connected devices.
AWS Elemental MediaStore delivers video from media-optimized storage.
AWS Elemental MediaTailor inserts targeted advertising into streaming video.
Elemental Live.
In April 2010, Elemental introduced its 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.
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.
Elemental Server.
In November 2009, Elemental released 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. 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. Elemental Servers reportedly sold for as much as $100,000 per machine, with a profit margin of up to 70%.
Elemental Delta.
Elemental Delta is a video delivery platform designed to optimize the monetization, management and distribution of multiscreen video across internal and external IP networks. Elemental Delta has been presented at IBC in September 2014 and won the IABM Design and Innovation award for Playout and Delivery Systems.
Elemental Cloud.
Elemental Cloud provides transcoding services in a cloud computing environment using clustered graphics processors.
Elemental Statmux.
Elemental Statmux is a software-based statistical multiplexer that optimizes content delivery for pay TV operators by reallocating bits in real time between video encoders and combining the outputs from multiple encoders into a single transport stream.
Elemental Conductor.
Elemental Conductor is a scalable management system of two or more Elemental video processing systems.
Badaboom.
On October 23, 2008, Elemental released Badaboom, a consumer media converter, in partnership with NVIDIA Corporation. 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.
Elemental Technologies announced Badaboom 2.0 is the final version and discontinued the product. The company supported Badaboom until April, 2013, without further software updates.