‘AV1 video codec is capturing a significant market share at the expense of HEVC’

The AV1 video codec from the Alliance for Open Media is gaining more and more ground compared to high efficiency video coding or hevc, also referred to as h265. This was reported by a video researcher during a discussion at the International Broadcasting Convention.

Krishna Rapaka, a video researcher at Twitch and Amazon, says that “AV1 is gaining ground against hevc and taking a lot of market share from h265,” writes FlatpanelsHD. He reports based on anecdotal evidence that AV1 adoption is growing at a rate of 30 to 40 percent per year. According to him, this growth is happening ‘quite quickly’.

The researcher does note that growth is currently mainly driven by software implementations. He says that hardware support is very important for services like Twitch. AV1 is already used by Netflix and YouTube and in terms of hardware, quite a few new smart TVs have built-in support. This also applies, for example, to smartphones with, among other things, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC; This is the first Snapdragon SoC from Qualcomm to support the AV1 codec. In addition, Intel, AMD and Nvidia have also promised support.

Once hardware support becomes more common, adoption of the codec will likely become even faster. It is a potential hitch EU investigation into licensing policy and for the time being, Apple has not implemented any concrete plans for supporting AV1, even though the Cupertino company is a member of the organization behind AV1.

AV1, or AOMedia Video 1, is a video compression codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media. Google, Apple, Netflix, Facebook, LG, Microsoft and Samsung are among others. The codec is seen as the successor to Google’s VP9. AV1 is a codec that was in fact created as a response to the licensing chaos that HEVC is experiencing. AV1 must also perform a lot better than VP9 or hevc, which means, for example, that the same video quality is possible at lower bit rates.