Kulabyte, a leading provider of advanced audio and video processing technologies, will be shipping the video encoding solution, Kulabyte Professional Flash Encoding Suite, on April 20th. The company made the announcement at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference in Las Vegas.

The Kulabyte Professional encoding solutions enable faster-than-real-time video encoding, enabling noticeably improved picture quality and significant bandwidth savings, while utilising industry standard codec engines. Media creators can encode, and distribute digital content at speeds more than 12 times faster than industry-standard codec times and deliver higher picture qualities.

A three-year old start-up company, Kulabyte is developing its patent-pending TimeSlice video encoding technology for a wide variety of applications. The company has introduced early versions of the technology at previous NAB and IBC industry conferences, as well as at other industry trade shows. The company has announced agreements recently with leading microprocessor company AMD, as well as leading video encoding firm On2 Technologies.

"We are entering the second generation of digital video encoding, and today's producers require fast, interoperable, efficient solutions for encoding that run on any codec, hardware, and network," said Chris Gottschalk, president and chief technology officer for Kulabyte. "The Kulabyte Professional Encoding Suite removes the bottleneck of encoding time, whether the application is encoding for DVD, broadcast, cable, satellite, Internet, or mobile networks."

Kulabyte offers its' exclusive Live 2- pass variable bit rate (VBR) encoding as well as in on-demand broadcasting, which enables media companies to realise superior picture quality, faster 1 pass and 2-pass encoding speeds and optimised bandwidth utilization. The Kulabyte Professional Encoding Suite will be unveiled at NAB in Las Vegas, April 16-19, at the Kulabyte booth #SL13713, in the lower level of the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

"I could not believe how easy the product was to install and operate. It ran on hardware I didn't think could work, processing compressed and uncompressed video as it buried all of the processors. I'm completely impressed with Kulabyte's fast performance, quality and ease of operation; and look forward to implementing it into our solutions," said Wally Dragich, president of Mississauga, Ontario-based digital video and animation hardware and software solutions provider IC Technology.

"The current model of encoding, streaming, and transferring any media is a time-intensive process involving many hours of research, quality checking, and data crunching. Kulabyte's technology represents an exciting new approach to the process that is certain to save us money in terms of both machine time and bandwidth requirements," said Seth Bennett, technical director with San Francisco-based film and video post-production firm Rough House.