BitJazz Inc.
Investor Relations

BitJazz Inc. is a privately held company, headquartered in Marin, California. Founded in September 1997, the company was incorporated as a California C Corporation in May 1998.

BitJazz Inc. is the industry leader in technology and products for real-time and nondestructive compression, decompression, and interconversion of moving and still images. In the production, editing, archival, transmission, and broadcast of digitized film, video, and digital images, using BitJazz systems saves time, space, and money while maintaining perfect image fidelity. Our real-time and lossless solutions enable many new workflows and processes which would otherwise be impossible.

Product History

The company began by addressing the nondestructive compression of real-world images, a burgeoning market facing a huge storage problem for uncompressed images. The patent-pending BitJazz lossless image compression technology was the first effective and practical solution to this problem, with a mean compression power of 2.47 that was 56% higher and 3 times as fast as the nearest competitor, PNG. Sold as PhotoJazz, the product includes cross-platform plug-ins for the most popular image-processing, publishing, and video-processing applications, with support for all color spaces, precisions, resolutions, and auxiliary channels. Today PhotoJazz is still the most versatile and one of the most powerful image codecs on the market.

In 2002, BitJazz Inc. turned to the problem of real-time nondestructive compression and decompression of real-world video and digitized film, a burgeoning market facing a gargantuan storage problem for uncompressed video and digitized film, for which the only previous solution, run-length encoding, often actually expands rather than compresses images. The fastest video codec in the world, BitJazz's patented SheerVideo technology (United States Patent 7693339) solves this problem with a remarkably high mean compression power of 2.2. The SheerVideo product includes cross-platform plug-ins for all popular video- and film-processing applications, with support for all formats, color spaces, precisions, chroma-sampling modes, scanning orders, and alpha channels. Today SheerVideo is still the only real-time lossless solution for high-definition and high-precision video and digitized film. Designed for firmware implementation for embedding in video cameras, projectors, and transmission channels, SheerVideo minimizes latency, memory, and computational requirements, for a tiny footprint and power consumption.

In 2004, BitJazz Inc. tackled the supposedly theoretically insoluble problem of nondestructive interconversion between the RGB and Y'CbCr color spaces, to bridge the markets of film and computer-generated RGB (spectral) imagery, and video imagery. The only lossless color-conversion engine in the world, BitJazz's patented Synchromy technology (United States Patent 7659911) is incorporated in SheerVideo, where it lets users edit video with film tools, and film with video tools, with no loss of information. Synchromy will also eventually be released as a separate product.

In 2006, the company extended its expertise to the problem of real-time fixed-rate compression and decompression of real-world video and digitized film, in response to demand from the professional video camera and broadcast markets, where a fixed bandwidth significantly impacts feasibility and cost, and makes real-time editing possible. BitJazz's solution (code-named CutTime), not yet productized, uses lossless compression whenever possible, and otherwise achieves the necessary bandwidth reduction without blurring or smoothing, showing no visible degradation even on individual pixels in high-detail real-world footage.