Hulu Joins Netflix and Amazon In Promoting Royalty-free Video Codec AV1 (fiercecable.com)

theweatherelectric writes: Hulu has joined the Alliance for Open Media, which is developing an open, royalty-free video format called AV1. AV1 is targeting better performance than H.265 and, unlike H.265, will be licensed under royalty-free terms for all use cases. The top three over-the-top SVOD services (Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu) are now all members of the alliance. In joining the alliance, Hulu hopes "to accelerate development and facilitate friction-free adoption of new media technologies that benefit the streaming media industry and [its] viewers."

Comments

GPU : Yes

[DrYak]

I wonder if GPUs can speed things up?

given that AMD, Nvidia, Intel, ARM, Broadcom are also on board (beside content providers like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and Google)
you can bet that Yes, there are going to be GPU implementations.

(And if you've followed the posts of Xiph - you know that they take GPU into account from the beginning).

Also there are already currently cloud based solution that distribute the compression workload accross a cluster.
(Video is split into smaller segment, each segment is independently compressed by a separate job on the cluster, then the compressed streams are concatenated together).
And bitmovin is already providing alpha support for AV-1 as it is now (so they can already test their solution and so, in a few months, on the day when AV-1 hits version 1.00 they are already ready and their users have already tested pipelines).

Actually the only single major player that is missing here is Apple.
Probably because they are betting all their marbles on their own patended H265/MPEG4 HEVC.
They are among the patent owners of the patent - so using/licensing H265 comes much more cheaper for them.
Which was the main reason for everybody else to drop H265 and consider joining Aomedia for AV-1 (between the original patent-pool, the other competing pools that have formed with other sets of patents and patent troll waiting to sue to try to get their share, licensing H265 is a much more expensive adventure than licensing H264/MPEG4 AVC was- To the point that H265 licenses cost a significant part of the price of embed ARM SoC as those used by cheap phones, ruining their competitivity)