How did you spend your weekend? Binge watching The Handmaid’s Tale? Catching up on your favorite late-night talk show? Maybe you’re all about Twitch.tv. Sound familiar? Then it should come as no surprise that the appetite for real-time HD video streaming is growing at a rapid clip – and it takes a mind-boggling amount of compute to bring those shows directly to the TV/phone/laptop/tablet/device of-your-choice whenever you want them - and in high definition! Streaming media providers need solutions to ease the strain on compute demand while providing a better user experience. (Who likes that circular buffer?) These solutions are few and far between, but today Xilinx declares - Buffer be gone!

Today, we are excited to announce that we have acquired NGCodec. NGCodec offers a powerful, differentiated video encoding technology that – when paired with a Xilinx acceleration platform – delivers greater visual quality at lower bandwidth requirements than any other solution in the market. With NGCodec’s team of talented engineers, Xilinx will be able to provide even more video capabilities to our data center customers.

NGCodec technology pushes the envelope on the latest cloud video encoding standards, including H.265/HEVC, VP9 and soon, AV1. With 70 percent of internet traffic coming from video streaming and growing at a rate of 50 percent year-over-year – the market forecast for cloud video processing estimates a SAM of $1.6 billion by 2023. You can see why we believe that cloud video processing will be a key driver for us.

NGCodec has been embraced across top cloud video streaming providers. But don’t just take our word for it – Twitch made a live appearance at our Xilinx Developer Forum last year to talk about the impressive results they experienced after implementing NGCodec VP9 running on a Xilinx platform.

Xilinx has been a technology partner and investor in NGCodec since 2016. NGCodec had about 35 employees and was based right down the street from us in Sunnyvale, Calif., with a second office in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

So now that we’re working to take care of all of the back-end technology stuff, you can just sit back, relax, and take in just… one… more… episode.