At The National Association of Broadcasters Show today, Intel and Netflix announced a new high-performance video codec that is available as open source and royalty-free to content creators, developers and service providers.

The Scalable Video Technology for AV1 (SVT-AV1) offers both high performance and efficiency. And compared to today’s most popular codec (H.264 AVC), SVT-AV1 can help service providers save up to half their bandwidthm according to Intel.

This codec makes it possible for services ranging from video on demand to live broadcast of 4Kp60/10-bit content.

The SVT-AV1 is based on the SVT architecture, which is a cohesive and highly optimized codec architecture that already has delivered multiple generations of codecs, including SVT-HEVC, SVT-VP9 and SVT-AV1. The new SVT-AV1 codecallows encoders to scale their performance levels based on the quality and latency requirements of the target applications — ranging from highest quality video on demand (VOD) to livestreaming use cases.

Intel says that the codec is optimized for video encoding on Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

The SVT-AV1 codec is available under a permissive BSD+Patent license. Developers can access SVT-AV1 at 01.org/OpenVisualCloud/svt.

In addition, Intel launched the Open Visual Cloud, an open-source project that includes a set of use case-optimized reference pipelines for visual workloads. These developer-ready pipelines are based on open-source media, artificial intelligence (AI) and graphics software ingredients. They support popular open-source frameworks that developers are familiar with. SVT, the OpenVINO Toolkit and the Intel Rendering Framework are all part of the Open Visual Cloud. The first two pipelines enable services for content delivery network (CDN) transcode VOD streaming and intelligent ad insertion.

Intel will demonstrate cloud graphics and media pipelines in development at NAB.

The Open Visual Cloud reference pipelines and building blocks for encode/decode, inference and render can be found on 01.org/OpenVisualCloud.