Good interview. I spoke with Oliver from NGCodec at NAB this year and I agree with a lot that was said.
FPGA is neat and disruptive because it's cloud native now, so you can get a lot of the flexibility of a pure software solution. I think there's a span of a few years where FPGAs make a lot of sense for dense live encoding, but then eventually ASIC encoders get even better / faster / more power efficient, and software encoders continue to offer better quality.
I think offline encoding for VOD streaming will still be done in software no matter what. I thought maybe there'd be a use case for FPGA AV1 encoding in the next year or so while software encoders (and CPUs) get fast enough to make AV1 encoding practical, but Oliver didn't seem to think this was a great use case. In retrospect, I'm inclined to agree.
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