As others have noted, Beamr's "magical" technology simply seems to be using x264, the state-of-the-art in H.264 encoders, which also happens to be free and open

As others have noted, Beamr's "magical" technology simply seems to be using x264, the state-of-the-art in H.264 encoders, which also happens to be free and open source software. Looking at their site, beamrvideo.com, the bitrates they list for the originals are what you'll typically find on Blu-ray discs, not on online streams. Anyone who knows a thing or two about video encoding and x264 will know that you can re-encode these to a much smaller size while retaining most of the visual quality. As such, claiming that they can reduce the bitrate to half with no notable loss in quality is like claiming that you can reduce the bit depth and sampling rate of a 24-bit 192 kHz audio file to 16-bit 48 kHz with no notable loss in quality - it's certainly true, but you hardly needed the 24-bit 192 kHz quality to begin with. They don't seem to have done anything new or substantial by themselves, and as such, this thing is basically nothing but pure marketing bullshit. If you want to do high quality H.264 encodes, just use x264 directly.