Specification of av1 video codec to save bandwidth comes online

The specification of the av1 video codec is ready and online. This has been announced by the Alliance for Open Media. Companies such as Google, Netflix, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are members of that alliance.

The integration of av1 support costs nothing and the technology is online with an open source license, says the alliance. Thanks to those specifications, hardware and software makers can get started to support av1. Thanks to better compression than, for example, vp9 or hevc, a video should cost 30 percent to 40 percent less bandwidth without users seeing a difference. That’s good, because much of the worldwide data consumption comes from streaming videos.

Mozilla has built av1 support into its Firefox browser as a test and the intention is that all major browsers will receive support for the codec within a year and a half. From next year, processors should support the decoding of av1, after which it should be quickly available on smartphones, tablets and PCs, among others.

Microsoft, Google, Intel, Mozilla, Amazon, Netflix and Nvidia co-founded the Alliance for Open Media in 2015 with the goal of developing a new improved video compression method more suitable for delivering content over networks.