The still relatively new AV1 video codec is gaining ground on HEVC, according to industry representatives, and upcoming hardware solutions are expected to accelerate adoption.

Designed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), AV1 is described as a royalty-free and open-source alternative to the royalty-based HEVC. AV1 launched roughly 4 years ago, and is today backed by Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix and other heavyweights.

For consumers, AV1 is said to outperform VP9 and HEVC by up 40% or 30% on average, according to statements made at the time of launch, for better video quality at the same bitrate or similar video quality at lower bitrates. AV1 supports HD, 4K and 8K video.

AV1 is in active use by Netflix (up to 4K SDR) and YouTube (up to 8K HDR), while other major players are seemingly waiting for wider and more robust support for hardware decoding in TVs, PCs, smartphones, and other types of devices.


 YouTube streaming in 8K HDR using AV1 on an 8K Smart TV

Despite the challenges, AV1 is taking a significant share from HEVC (H.265) which is the successor to the universally deployed MPEG4 (H.264), and MPEG2 (H.263) before that. This is according to industry members discussing the development at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC).

- "The OTT workspace has been growing at a much faster rate for AV1, and it’s taking a lot of share from H265 HEVC. The numbers that I heard (anecdotally) are that there’s a 30% to 40% growth in AV1 adoption year over year, which is quite fast. But what we see is most of this is software driven at this point of time, but for services like Twitch hardware solutions are pretty critical because of the density and because of the scalability," said Krishna Rapaka, Video Researcher at Twitch/Amazon.

Some newer Smart TVs already have hardware-level support for AV1, in addition to HEVC, and AV1 is also starting to show up in smartphones and PCs. However, Apple has yet to outline its plans for AV1 despite joining the association in 2018.

- "I think over the past few years, we have had hardware vendors start to include AV1 encoding support in their products. On the PC side we see Intel, AMD and Nvidia already announce hardware support, and also a lot of TV manufacturers have also added hardware decoder support," said Ryan Lei, Software Engineer, Video Codec Specialist at Meta. "On the mobile side we’re seen MediaTek and Samsung announce hardware decoding in their mobile SOC and recently Qualcomm also announced hardware support for their next generation Snapdragon SoC. So we’re hoping this adoption starts from the high end and then over the next, one or two years will trickle down to lower end mobile phones. As I said before, we have heavily optimised software that can already support encoding on most of the existing Android platforms. So I think ecosystem topology is definitely much better than a few years ago."

On the other hand, one factor that could hinder adoption is the ongoing EU antitrust investigation into the Alliance for Open Media's licensing policy for AV1.

- Source: IBC