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The scalable extension (SVC) of H.264/AVC uses a notion of layers within the encoded bitstream for providing temporal, spatial and quality scalability, separately or combined. This scalability allows adaptation depending on the scenarios with different devices and heterogeneous networks. The SVC design requires scalability to be provided at the encoder side by exploiting inter-layer dependencies during encoding. This implies that existing H.264/AVC content cannot benefit from the scalability tools in SVC due to the lack of intrinsic scalability provided in the bitstream at encoding time. Since a lot of technical and financial effort is currently being spent on the migration from MPEG-2 equipment to H.264/AVC, it is unlikely that a new migration to SVC will occur in the short term. Due to broadcasters and content distributors want to have scalable bitstreams at their disposal, efficient techniques for migration of single-layer content to a scalable format are desirable. In this paper, an approach for temporal scalability transcoding from H.264/AVC to SVC is discussed. This approach is applied to the upper layers of SVC, where coding complexity is higher, and it is capable to reduce this coding complexity around to 55.75% while maintaining the coding efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]