AV1 Codec

Explanation

AV1 is a video compression standard developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) — a consortium including Google, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and major chip manufacturers — and released in 2018. AV1 achieves roughly 30–50% better compression than H.264 (AVC) and 20–30% better than H.265 (HEVC) at equivalent visual quality, meaning a 4K stream requires significantly less bandwidth. Netflix began using AV1 on Android devices in 2020 and expanded to TVs and browsers by 2022. YouTube uses AV1 for 4K and higher resolution playback on supported devices. The codec's main advantage for streaming services is bandwidth cost reduction — serving the same quality at lower bitrates directly cuts CDN costs at scale. The main limitation is encoding time and hardware decoding support — older devices lack AV1 hardware decoders and must use slower software decoding, which drains battery and causes heat.