Intel, Netflix team up to deliver AV1 codec for visual workloads

Intel and Netflix today announced at NAB that they’re working together on the AV1 high-performance video codec that will make the AV1 standard commercially viable for the first time. Their joint technology is named Scalable Video Technology for AV1 (SVT-AV1).AV1 is an open-source, royalty-free video codec that was developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). AOMedia, which was founded in 2015, counts Amazon, Apple, Intel, Microsoft and Netflix among its founding members. AOMedia makes the open AV1 video compression software available on GitHub. Lynn Comp, Intel’s vice president of the Network Platforms group and general manager of Intel's Visual Cloud division, said in an interview with FierceVideo that one impetus for AOMedia and the AV1 codec is that streaming media companies “really needed bandwidth efficiencies that weren’t present in other standards and with less restrictive patent pools or undefined ownership.She said SVT-AVI is seeing more than 50% better bit rate efficiency than AVC with no drop in quality.Intel has been able to advance the AV1 codec with technology from Intel’s acquisition of eBrisk in 2018. There doesn’t appear to be an official announcement of the eBrisk acquisition, but eBrisk’s former President and CEO Faouzi Kossentini has been working at Intel since August 2018 in the role of director of architecture and engineering in the Visual Cloud software innovations group, according to his LinkedIn profile.