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Nokia and Imeve announce handoff of Nokia OZO Live

By January 8, 2018 February 19th, 2018 No Comments

Today we are thrilled to announce that Imeve has reached an agreement with Nokia to continue the development and sale of the Nokia OZO Live video production software under the Imeve brand. In addition, Imeve plans to develop new solutions based upon Nokia’s OZO Audio, OZO Deliver and OZO Player technologies.

During 2016 and 2017, Imeve’s founders led the Nokia OZO Live team. We supported our partners and customers in the field for some of the largest live 360 video productions in the world. We delivered pioneering innovations such as live 4K-per-eye multicamera workflows, live spatial audio mixing, and live viewport-adaptive streaming.  In the process, not only did we learn what’s possible with immersive technology today, we learned how much more work we have yet to do to realize this new medium’s potential.

After Nokia’s discontinuation of the OZO camera program, we were eager to find a way to continue to support our customers, and to continue to develop creative solutions for live immersive production. We are grateful to Paul Melin, VP of Digital Media and Technology Licensing at Nokia, for recognizing that Imeve’s continued development of the OZO technology is a win-win for Nokia, for OZO owners, and for the greater VR/AR community. “I’m really excited for the team at Imeve and wish them great success as they continue to break new ground in VR content creation and delivery,” Paul said in his own post on the Nokia site.

So what’s next?

Already, the Imeve team has begun working to extend the OZO Live codebase to support new features, new hardware, and new use cases. Before the end of Q1 we plan to provide a new release for OZO — featuring 60fps 4K-per-eye stereoscopic over standard 1.5G SDI! But perhaps more importantly, the new Imeve Live will soon be accessible to a broader user base, with support for less expensive camera hardware and Windows compatibility. We want high-quality immersive production tools to be accessible for any professional videographer anywhere in the world.

Looking beyond our first release, we have a lot of ideas on what to build next — but we need to hear from you. Please sign up for our newsletter, drop us an email, find us on Facebook, or send a carrier pigeon – however we get it, we want your input! We want to know what tools you need to move this new medium forward. And we want to build them.