While Sony may be seeing layoffs in a number of their gaming studios, the company is still working towards expanding on other fronts for their gaming platform. Sony has announced they’re acquiring the video delivery AI firm, iSize.

Per iSize’s website, the firm specializes in greatly reducing video bitrate while maintaining quality compared to standard encoders such as H.264/265 and AV1. They also appear to be introducing a new means of creating photorealistic neural avatars.

There are different ways PlayStation could use this acquisition beyond their statement of it improving the R&D of their “video and streaming services”. AI has become a hot trend in the gaming industry, so the company could use this technology in their games in some way.

Another potential use for the company is this could be a way for them to break into the metaverse, which has lost a lot of momentum from just a year ago. It has been known that Sony has had ambitious metaverse plans for a while now.

Either way, it’ll be interesting to see how this acquisition may affect PlayStation and Sony in the future.