Intel Finally Announces SVT-AV1, To Be Used By Netflix

We've been pretty much exclusively reporting on - and benchmarking - the Intel SVT-AV1 open-source encoder since the start of February while finally today Intel has formally announced this initiative. It also turns out Netflix is cooperating with Intel on this Scalable Video Technology with their plan to make use of it.

SVT-AV1 is part of their Scalable Video Technology umbrella of codecs, including the SVT-VP9 and SVT-HEVC encoders we have also been benchmarking a lot.

We have been quite impressed by its performance gains in recent months while closely tracking its development (and continuing to benchmark the SVT encoders daily at LinuxBenchmarking.com) especially that it can achieve 1080p @ 60 FPS, making it much faster than any other CPU-based AV1 encoder we have seen to date. In today's announcement they note it as "makes it possible for services ranging from video on demand to live broadcast of 4Kp60/10-bit content on Intel Xeon Scalable processors, including the recently launched 2nd-Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor."

Netflix will be using SVT-AV1 for speeding up their AV1 video encoding and ultimately adoption of this royalty-free video codec competing with H.265.

More details on the BSD-licensed SVT-AV1 encoder via the Intel Newsroom.