Literally the first sentence of the linked page:
"Even though over 70% of internet traffic today is digital media, the way images and video are represented and transmitted has not evolved much in the past 20 years (apart from Pied Piper's Middle-Out algorithm)."
EDIT: This is embarrassing that not one person in this thread seems to have actually read any of the paper. Now with obvious evidence that this is fiction, people still don't want to believe it.
https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=reEAEWsAAAAJ&hl=en
https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=OXFjRnEAAAAJ&hl=en
Company entry on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/12953035/
Why would they have this in the actual PDF?
"Finally, Pied Piper has recently claimed to employ ML techniques in its Middle-Out algorithm (Judge et al., 2016), although their nature is shrouded in mystery"
This is promotion, they are getting a fake paper to permeate throughout the internet. If I had to guess, I would say they are making a statement about reproducing results in academia and not taking a single paper as gospel. If so, I think they are making their point pretty well.
I guess once you get popular enough you can get TV consultants who can propose real solutions as TV props. Heh.
They obviously have some good image priors here, if I were them I would consider applying this tech to other image-related things, like image manipulation, or image search. Although competition is heating up quickly in these fields...