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Xilinx Bets Big On Cloud Video With NGCodec Acquisition

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Real time video is driving the next wave of social video apps and cable cutting. New social apps like TikTok and live streaming pioneers like Twitch face the challenge of processing millions of hours of video streams and delivering them to millions of concurrent users. Reducing the bandwidth required and delivering high-quality live video are critical to the success of emerging entertainment and social media services. 

Xilinx recently announced the acquisition of startup NGCodec. The two companies have been working together for more than five years with teams in Santa Clara and Waterloo to develop high-performance video encoders designed to run on Xilinx’s FPGAs. Historically, hardware encoders were fast, but provided lower-quality video using older encoding technology. What set NGCodec apart was using programmable hardware (FPGAs) - not just software running on industry standard x86 servers - to encode  broadcast quality video in real time using the latest codecs like H.265/HEVC and VP9. The use of NGCodec codecs on Xilinx high performance FPGAs has the potential to create a new breed of cloud applications that can utilize video encoding in combination with AI and specialized algorithmic processing. 

Amazon’s Twitch streaming video network has already announced its intent to use NCGodec’s encoders for VP9 streams in order to drive down bandwidth requirements and improve video quality for the most popular streams. And, the encoders can be used in FPGA instances in the public cloud, notably with Amazon and Alibaba.

“TIRIAS Research forecasts that cloud video encoding will grow from 1.4 million concurrent HD encoding streams in 2019 to over 50 million in 2029,” said Simon Solotko, a Contributing Analyst at Tirias Research who served as the VP of Marketing at NGCodec at the time of the acquisition. “The requirements for cloud infrastructure increase dramatically when you stand up services that process live social streams from millions of smartphone users.”

The use of FPGAs for processing video is not new, however, employing FPGAs in the public cloud and competing head-to-head with x86 cloud servers is new. FPGAs are known for their flexibility and for their ability to provide efficient processing for computationally-intensive workloads and machine learning. In 2015, Intel, the x86 server leader, acquired Altera for approximately $16.7 billion in order to enter the high-performance FPGA market. Xilinx remains the FPGA leader and is Intel’s primary competitor. The teams at Intel and Xilinx are competing to deliver the holy grail of high-quality live video, at a low total cost, which includes the cost of bandwidth, servers, and power.

“Today, encoding live video is expensive - a server at full utilization can encode just a single live feed to multiple resolutions, typically 1080p down to 480p. The rise of 4K video necessitates more computationally demanding, but bandwidth saving, technologies like H.265.HEVC, VP9 and the next generation AV1 codec,” continued Simon. “Live video encoders tend to be inefficient creating big, high-bitrate streams that are expensive to deliver. Increasing the quality of the video and lowering the bandwidth while reducing the required number of servers are all simultaneously required to make emerging live, social video services viable. Emerging technologies like hardware video encoding, machine learning, and 5G promise to deliver new video-centric applications at ubiquitous mobile-social scale.”

For Xilinx, this builds out the company’s data center portfolio by providing a balanced hardware and software solution to meet the needs of streaming video applications. It also complements the company’s FPGA and AI technologies, which promise to blend with video encoding to deliver new applications. In addition, Xilinx gains expertise in codec design and innovation from a team that has worked for Harmonic, Magnum, VideoLocus, Toshiba, and many others. TIRIAS Research believes this was a timely acquisition by Xilinx as the video streaming market accelerates.

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