AV1

Video has become the dominant medium for delivering news, entertainment, and educational content, as well as a core component of gaming, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR). But for developers working with video, the challenges of encoding, transmitting, and decoding high-quality streams at scale remain significant.

Traditional video codecs are bandwidth-heavy, computationally expensive, and require massive storage capacity. Optimizing for efficiency often means trade-offs in quality or performance. However, modern advancements in video compression—specifically AV1—offer a more effective approach.

In this article, we'll break down AV1's architecture, its practical applications, and its constraints. We'll also explore 10 common use cases and the complexities of migrating from legacy codecs that have been industry standards for years.

Let's dive in.

What Is AV1?

AV1, or AOMedia Video 1, is an efficient method for encoding and transmitting high-quality video. The video codec all but eliminates buffering when streaming a movie, watching live sports, participating in multiplayer online games, or consuming online video through any other application.

To understand the natural progression that led to AV1, you need to understand the recent history in the field:

• March 2003: Release of H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) as a joint effort between two international standards bodies: the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). H.264's use is restricted by patents owned by several parties, translating into royalties for its use.
• May 2003: On2 Technologies released its TrueMotion VP6 codec, which is free for personal use but under license for commercial use.
• March 2005: On2 Technologies released its TrueMotion VP7 codec under the same terms.
• September 2008: On2 Technologies released its TrueMotion VP8 codec under the same terms.
• February 2010: Google acquires On2 Technologies. Almost immediately, VP8 is rereleased under a BSD license.
• June 2013. ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG responded to the technical shortcomings of H.264 (AVC) by announcing H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). Due to patent protection, royalties were attached to its use.
• June 2013. Google unveils VP9 as an open and royalty-free video coding format.

Developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) in 2015, AV1 follows that same free and open-source software (FOSS) path. AOMedia is a consortium instigated by Google that involves Amazon, Apple, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix. Their goal was to extend the functionality of VP9 to provide improved compression and greater efficiency.

Advantages of AV1

AOMedia designed AV1 as "a step up from VP9 and HEVC" in efficiency for a relatively small increase in encoding complexity. It was also designed specifically for real-time applications (especially WebRTC) and features higher resolution (wider color gamuts, higher frame rates, UHD) than previous generation codecs.

AV1 addresses several key challenges:

• Licensing Fees: AV1 is royalty-free.
• Compression Efficiency: Studies indicate AV1 offers 30%-50% better compression than VP9 and HEVC at the same visual quality, cutting bandwidth needs.
• Open-Source Access: The source code for AV1 is freely available for developers and companies to integrate into their products.
• Future-Proof Video Streaming: Designed for 4K, 8K, HDR, and VR/AR applications.

Constraints on Use

Despite its many advantages, widespread adoption of AV1 faces some challenges. Chief among these is computational complexity, which has exposed the limitations of the current hardware installed base. The irony of a "future-proof" video codec not playing videos smoothly at high resolutions (4K or 8K) without hardware acceleration wasn't lost on the industry.

That led to industry inertia as producers waited for hardware vendors to incorporate hardware acceleration into new products. Then, they waited for those products to move beyond the early adopter stage and become a significant portion of the installed base.

There's another installed base around which resistance has coalesced. Broadcasters and TV networks have built massive infrastructure around H.264/HEVC or VP9. To move to AV1, they must re-encode their massive content libraries --- a significant investment that may not be justified yet.

Power consumption on mobile devices is another inhibitor of software-based AV1 decoding. AV1 hardware support only began to arrive on mobile phones and tablets around 2023, so the full rollout is still to come.

• 2024--2025: Widespread hardware decoding support across new devices.
• 2025--2027: Hardware encoding support available to make AV1 viable in live streaming and broadcasting applications.
• 2027: Based on current adoption rates, AV1 should replace VP9 and HEVC in most streaming applications.

Typical Use Cases

There are many use cases for AV1 and almost as many different environments in which to roll it out. We've looked at some of the more obvious ones and some you might not have considered. If there's a common thread, it's that they all hinge on AV1's ability to deliver high-quality, low-latency streams while reducing data usage.

1. Streaming Services

The most apparent use of AV1 is for streaming services, especially when it's real-time video at play. And that's because its compression is 30-50% more efficient than the long-time industry standard and legacy codec, H.264.

This dramatically reduces bandwidth usage without degrading visual quality. It's used in video-on-demand services like YouTube, Vimeo, and other platforms to deliver high-quality video with lower data requirements. And the compression efficiency minimizes latency in live-streaming applications.

2. Social Media Platforms

As a founding member of the AOMedia consortium, Meta would be among the first to blink. In November 2022, the company announced that it had incorporated AV1 into Facebook and Instagram Reels.

In a subsequent blog post, Meta noted that AV1 delivers 30 percent better coding efficiency than VP9 and HEVC. This results in higher-quality video using far less bandwidth and maximizing storage efficiency. It also enabled Meta to reduce egress traffic, CDN prefetching/caching, and network congestion.

3. Video Conferencing Tools

Cisco, Google, and Microsoft already use the new codec in their video conferencing platforms, as do Zoho Meeting, Zoom, and many others.

The benefits are clear: high-quality video with a lower bandwidth overhead and less latency. That's a major plus when some participants connect from remote parts of the world where bandwidth is constrained or unreliable.

4. Gaming Apps

The same qualities that make it ideal for other use cases recommend AV1 for online and cloud gaming applications such as NVIDIA GeForce NOW, Xbox Cloud Gaming, and PlayStation Now. While game rendering happens on remote servers, games rely on efficient video streaming to deliver their immersive experience.

Better video compression is a boon for mobile gamers and users with data caps, as it lowers video bitrate without losing quality. It also makes online gaming more accessible in countries with expensive internet connectivity. Hardware limitations and encoding time are still barriers, but developers are rapidly overcoming them.

5. Virtual Reality (VR) & Augmented Reality (AR)

The same arguments applicable to online and cloud gaming apply to Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) applications, possibly even more so. High-resolution, high-frame-rate video streams are critical to providing immersive experiences in VR and AR applications.

While AV1's superior compression capabilities can efficiently deliver such streams, the same inhibitors are also present. However, newer devices are addressing this with built-in hardware acceleration.

6. Broadcast & Over-the-Top (OTT) Services

Broadcast TV and Over-the-Top (OTT) services are another great fit for AV1. It offers superior compression efficiency, improved video quality, and cost savings. However, hardware limitations, standardization challenges, and legacy infrastructure inhibit the transition.

These services push video content over the internet to various devices. And, like the other use cases, a successful transition will rely on the decoding hardware being built into the devices. At the same time, some of these services are well-advanced with their rollout plans:

• Netflix started using AV1 for mobile streaming in 2020 and added support for select smart TVs and streaming devices two years later. 
• YouTube began testing AV1 for select videos in 2018 and made it the default for 4K/8K streaming on compatible devices in 2020. Since 2023, the company has been pushing AV1 for all new video encodes.
• Amazon Prime Video is experimenting with AV1 on select 4K and HDR content.
• Disney+, Hulu, and HBO Max are evaluating AV1 for future expansion.
• Twitch is testing AV1 support but requires widespread hardware encoding adoption.

7. IoT & Smart Devices

The use of AV1 in IoT (Internet of Things) and smart devices is expanding rapidly. These devices are handling more video streaming, surveillance, and real-time communication. The codec's excellent compression capabilities and energy efficiency make it ideal in bandwidth-constrained, low-power environments such as smart cameras, mobile devices, and embedded systems.

But here, too, there are constraints. Again, hardware decoding support remains limited, and many low-cost IoT devices lack dedicated AV1 hardware decoders. Only newer chipsets (MediaTek Dimensity, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, Apple A17, Intel Arc, NVIDIA, AMD RDNA 3) support AV1 decoding efficiently.

Also, AV1 encoding is computationally expensive, making real-time processing difficult for most low-power IoT chips. Battery constraints in devices like wearables, doorbells, and security cameras expose the need for more efficient AV1 hardware. Finally, AV1 adoption is slow because older IoT devices still use H.264/VP9 and streaming protocols (HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), DASH), and smart home platforms lack full AV1 support.

8. Video Archives & File Sharing

Similarly, AV1's high compression efficiency perfectly suits video archives, cloud storage, and file-sharing platforms. It helps them reduce file sizes without compromising quality and controls costs with royalty-free licensing.

While it's a virtual no-brainer at the server end, client-side hardware decoding and encoding limitations inhibit the roll-out. Older devices and media players don't natively support AV1, which requires modern GPUs, smartphones, or software-based decoding for playback. Re-encoding an extensive archive can also be time-consuming.

Despite this, AV1 is increasingly used by cloud storage services, video-sharing platforms, and digital archives to reduce storage costs and improve streaming efficiency. For example, Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive all use it to optimize storage.

9. Mobile Applications

Although AV1 has broad applications across many different use cases, it was developed and optimized with our mobile world in mind. And despite Netflix and YouTube having built massive libraries of AV1-encoded content, it's only in the last year or so that AV1 hardware support began to appear on smartphones and tablets.

However, things move quickly once they happen in the mobile world. AV1's superior compression, high quality at low bitrates, and energy efficiency will revolutionize live streaming, video calling, gaming, and social media. It'll deliver smoother playback, reduced storage and bandwidth needs, and extended battery life.

10. Edge Computing

One area in which AV1 is already making a significant impact is edge computing. In this use case, real-time video processing, low-latency video streams, and bandwidth efficiency are critical. AV1's better compression and quality make edge devices use less bandwidth, perform better in video, and streamline cloud-offloading tasks.

When video encoding and decoding happens at the network edge, it offers more efficient video processing. There are several techniques already in use to improve encoding speed at the edge:

• Hardware-accelerated encoding using GPUs, ASICs, FPGAs, etc.
• Fast modes to prioritize speed over compression efficiency or quality.
• Superblocks and tile-based encoding allow multi-threaded processing.
• AI-powered video processing to predict optimal compression settings.

Challenges in Implementing AV1

There's little doubt that AV1 will become the de facto standard for video encoding and decoding, but it'll take time. Currently, several challenges prevent it from displacing H.264 and H.265. There are two big ones:

• Legacy hardware. It'll take time for manufacturers to add AV1 encoding and decoding capabilities to all their products, but it'll happen.
• Hardware vs software decoding. AV1 decoding with hardware can be five times faster and four times more energy-efficient than with software. That situation is unlikely to reverse any time soon.

AV1 Is the Future of Video

To say that AV1 has revolutionized the video streaming industry may be premature. Its compression efficiency, excellent video quality, lower storage costs, and reduced network congestion have certainly had an impact. That it manages to achieve this at lower bitrates is just the cherry on top.

However, with technological advances, there are always trade-offs. In the case of AV1, the big one is its complexity, which demands more computational power. But once AV1-capable hardware becomes more widespread, the pace will accelerate.

That'll take time, but as Meta, Netflix, and YouTube have already demonstrated, rolling AV1 out now using software encoding can give you a first-mover advantage. As hardware encoding becomes available, that advantage will only deepen.

Frequently Asked Questions