What Is the Visual Cloud?
With visual computing workloads growing at an accelerating pace, cloud service providers (CSPs), communications service providers (CoSPs), and enterprises are rethinking the physical and virtual distribution of compute resources. Visual cloud computing consists of a set of capabilities for remotely consuming content and services that center around the efficient delivery of visual experiences —both live and file-based —as well as applications that add intelligence to video content and tap into machine learning and other artificial intelligence areas, such as object recognition.
Video: Software and open source tools are key to the Visual Cloud, network, and devices ›
Chip Chat Podcast: Visual Cloud Evolution and Ecosystem Adoption ›
Blog: Global video demand requires new hardware and software solutions ›
White Paper: Rethinking Visual Cloud Services for Evolving Media
The impact of media growth on cloud-based data centers will create a burden for CSPs, CoSPs, and enterprises. Read this white paper to learn about solutions to this challenge.
The Open Visual Cloud
To help strengthen the ecosystem and provide ready access to the building blocks and pipelines for cost-effective Visual Cloud innovations, Intel is providing reference pipeline recipes for Visual Cloud services using existing open source functions from Intel in an open source project called the Open Visual Cloud. The Open Visual Cloud provides availability of high performance, high quality, open source, validated building blocks—across encode, decode, inference, and rendering — as well as reference pipelines that support visual cloud workloads. The goal is to minimize barriers to innovation for quickly and easily creating and monetizing Visual Cloud services. Support for familiar industry standard frameworks leverage the larger open source community and include media (FFMPEG and GStreamer), AI (TensorFlow*, Caffe*, MXNet*, ONNX*, Kaldi*), and graphics (OpenGL, DirectX).
Find out more about the Open Visual Cloud, download code, and unleash innovation at
AOMedia Software Implementation Working Group to Bring AV1 to More Video Platforms ›
Why More Companies Are Using the Open Source AV1 Video Codec ›
Main Concept Brings Fast, Efficient AV1 Encoding to More Video Platforms ›
Netflix Blog: Open-source AV1 encoder and decoder performance ›
White Paper: Scalable Video Technology for the Visual Cloud with AWS* Cloud Instance Measurements ›
Media Processing
Cloud-based media processing and delivery demands in response to escalating video traffic across wired and wireless channels have become a vitally important service capability for CSPs, CoSPs, and Enterprises. The predominant use cases involving media workloads are live streaming, broadcast media, and over-the-top (OTT) media. The new Intel® Server GPU is ideal for high-density media transcode/encode for real-time over the top (OTT) video streaming. The Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512), makes it possible to accelerate high-quality video transcoding and streaming. Demanding tasks that are vital to a Visual Cloud environment gain performance boosts, including media analytics, video data encoding and decoding, digital content creation, 3D modeling and simulation, and visualization. Additional microarchitecture and instruction sets to drastically enhance visual cloud capabilities, like VNNI (Vector Neural Network Instructions) that improves performance of operations used in deep neural networks.
Blog: Unlocking lower total Cost of Ownership for Visual Cloud Services ›
Anevia collaborates with Intel to deliver performance breakthrough in OTT service delivery ›
Qwilt Blog: Changing content delivery forever ›
Read how ATEME* decreased content distribution costs without damaging video quality ›
Video: See how Quortex and Intel reduce your streaming Total Cost with Audience Aware Encoding ›
Media Analytics
Media analytics performed on live media or distributed video streams can help service providers, content aggregators, and content delivery networks better understand the nature of the visual content and derive useful intelligence from it. By incorporating building blocks from the Open Visual Cloud, like key components of the OpenVINO™ toolkit and Scalable Video Technology, sophisticated media analytics applications can perform functions from surveying traffic patterns in a smart city to customized ad insertion and more. With billions of pieces of visual content exchanged daily, the market opportunities are expansive for creating new, useful services and adding features, and capabilities to existing services.
Case study: China Mobile Driving Edge-Cloud Collaboration ›
Celestica's new Intel®-based accelerator card for media analytics VCAC-A ›
Immersive Media
Innovation in AR and VR solutions is changing the way that human beings interact with the world. These technologies are also inspiring innovators to introduce new products, services, and business models into the visual cloud market, creating opportunities for CSPs, CoSPs, and broadcast companies. Advanced immersive media applications are just beginning to gain traction in the industry, such as 360-degree live streaming, AR-guided service procedures, immersive entertainment experiences, and VR enhanced location-based experiences. Recent advances in moving Visual Cloud workloads to the network edge are providing for more quality experiences by addressing the bandwidth concerns and latency issues that have been a challenge for many immersive media deployments.
Netzyn case study: Achieving 8K real-time streaming from the Cloud ›
Producing Live 8K, 360-Degree Streaming Media Events: An Owner’s Blueprint ›
Business Brief: Lightning-fast video retrieval delivers better 8K VR experiences ›
Blog: Mozilla shows how Intel-backed open source codecs are transforming online video ›
Cloud Graphics
People can work collaboratively across 3D graphics applications remotely. With applications from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware, complex renderings, and visualizations can be handled by high-performance servers in a virtualized environment so remote desktop or remote rendering workloads can be adjusted dynamically to meet requirements. Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with the Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit (Render Kit) (part of the Open Visual Cloud) provide powerful and flexible CPU-based raytracing used extensively by professional Hollywood studios and the scientific visualization community.
Chaos Case Study: Ray tracing for everyone, on-premises or in the cloud ›
Celestica's new Intel®-based accelerator card for rendering VCAC-R ›
Cloud Gaming
On-line gaming is moving to a cloud streaming model just like music, movies, and TV shows. The burgeoning growth of online games represents additional revenue with white-label software allowing operators to brand, offer, and monetize an OTT-like service to their subscribers and target casual gamers at home. The new Intel® Server GPU is ideally suited for high-density, low-latency Android cloud gaming.
Read about telecommunications provider Etisalat using GameStream* and Intel ›
Notices & Disclaimers
Intel is committed to respecting human rights and avoiding complicity in human rights abuses. See Intel’s Global Human Rights Principles. Intel’s products and software are intended only to be used in applications that do not cause or contribute to a violation of an internationally recognized human right.
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