Thor is still in its development stages and currently not any sort of alternative to HEVC but Cisco has big plans for the codec. The company wants to use it to join together others in the industry and create a higher-quality video codec that’s not only much cheaper to use but also superior to HEVC and free of restrictive, expensive licensing burdens.
Source: Cisco developing a new royalty-free compression codec for 4K video that’s aimed at rivalling HEVC –