Honey, I shrunk the data: The company reducing the size of videos, not the quality

Sergio Grce and Yiannis Andreopoulos realised there was a huge environmental issue with ‘the cloud’ – too much data is being used in giant servers. They told Andy Martin how iSize is combatting this by compressing videos and keeping the quality

Sergio Grce (left) and Yiannis Andreopoulos (iSize)

Can you get a quart into a pint pot? You’d think not, but finally iSize has worked out how. At least as far as a quart of video is concerned. Honey, I shrunk the data. I was able to speak to Sergio Grce and Yiannis Andreopoulos, CEO and co-founder and CTO respectively, and find out how it’s done.

His mother is Croatian, his father Serbian. He lived in Brazil and was educated in London at the Cass Business School. He went to work for Merrill Lynch and RBS. But investment banking was never going to be quite enough for Sergio Grce: “I didn’t have the heart for finance. I was more into art.” In 2014 he gave up his six-figure salary in his comfortable corporate world and set up Fusion Art Works, creating art using AI, and discovered there was a demand for very large prints of Picasso, which posed an interesting challenge.

“The algorithm produced only a small picture, so we had to upscale,” says Sergio. “The question was how to stretch the image without losing the quality.”