Apple has acquired the Mountain View-based start-up WaveOne, which developed artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for compressing video. The tech giant has not yet confirmed the acquisition, TechCrunch reported. 

WaveOne's website was taken down in January and some of its former employees, including one of its co-founders, now work for Apple's machine learning groups. WaveOne's former head of sales and business development, Bob Stankosh, revealed the sale in a LinkedIn post published last month. 

WaveOne was founded in 2016 by Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel, and the company aimed to use AI to power video codecs. WaveOne's technology was hardware-agnostic and could reduce the size of video files by as much as 50 per cenr, making it more efficient for streaming. The start-up's algorithm could understand a video frame, and prioritise faces over other elements in a scene to save bandwidth.

The acquisition could be viewed as an obvious step for Apple, as the tech giant already offers a range of video streaming services, including Apple TV+. Even slight improvements in video compression could enable Apple to deliver higher resolutions and frame rates, or save on bandwidth costs. Apple's acquisition of WaveOne comes after Alphabet's DeepMind also used AI algorithms to develop a machine learning algorithm to compress YouTube videos, leading to a 4 per cent reduction in the amount of data the video-sharing service needs to stream to users.

WaveOne's technology is an example of how AI could be used to improve video streaming efficiency. AI-powered scene and object detection can enable the algorithm to make a "best guess" based on whatever bits of video data are available, so that sudden disruptions in connectivity do not affect the streaming quality. The acquisition of WaveOne by Apple is an indication that the tech giant is continuing to invest in machine learning and AI to improve the efficiency of its services.