For those who are following me on twitter @agouaillard, or are following cosmo @rtc-cosmo this is old news: CoSMo Software has been selected to be part of the INTEL Innovator program. Let’s dig into what it means really.

INTEL is the last of a list of big corporations which recognise cosmo expertise and contributions to WebRTC after Google, Microsoft, Apple, … Some very successful start-ups even start acknowledging publicly nowadays our contributions.

While we have been exchanging and collaborating with the china-based WebRTC group, now called OWT group after open-sourcing of their solution for many years now (more news to come on that later in the year), this selection is the result of an extended work on the AV1 codec.

CoSMo and INTEL are both selected members of AOMedia. With multiple others, we have been working on the AV1 codec, with an emphasis on the real-time mode for CoSMo. This has been documented in a previous post.

INTEL has started working on optimised throughput and parallelism first, in collaboration with Netflix, also member of AOMedia. Their big announcement about their SVT-AV1 hasn’t gone unseen at NAB 2019, the mecca of the broadcast industry in the USA.

INTEL Codec is optimised for intel servers with XEON processors, much less for client-side encoding. While CoSMo is traditionnally focussed on the client-side part of WebRTC, and while WebRTC is mainly using SFU which do not require media manipulation server-side, there are several use-case where transcoding is needed in a webrtc system.

Cisco has sown on june 27th in their worldwide first real time encoding of AV1, that when integrated in webex, it sometimes required transcoding to an older codec to support existing devices or software clients that have not yet been or cannot be updated to support AV1.

Equally, in MilliCast, the leading WebRTC streaming platform, need to accommodate for streaming hardware, or streaming softwares that cannot be updated to support WebRTC. Open-source software like OBS-Studio can be updated, and illustrates the advantages of using WebRTC end-to-end (capturer to renderer, glass-to-glass), just like native clients can. However, there is an incredibly large installed based of closed-source software and Hardware that cannot be upgraded and should be supported. For that reason, RTMP ingest is usually chosen, given that RTMP is the closest there is to webrtc when it comes to real-time, and it is supported by most existing clients broadcasting to e.g. youtube or twitch today, with much higher latency, use it. SVT-AV1 has definitely a role to take there.

We do not want to spoil the surprise, there are other, more innovative use cases at the intersection of the streaming world and the WebRTC world. Some of them will be presented at IBC by CoSMo and by INTEL. DO not hesitate to contact us or INTEL ahead of time to secure your spot to those close door demos.

Both CoSMo and INTEL never stop innovating. Having CoSMo part of the Innovation program will allow INTEL to disclose early on new technologies, new hardware, new SDK, and leverage CoSMo’s creativity and domain expertise to make the best out of it. We are proud and honoured to have been accepted in this prestigious program, and will do our best to prove worthy. Expect great things coming forward.