What Is AV1 and Should You Use It for Video Streaming

AV1 and VP9 share the same pitch: royalty-free, better compression than H.264, built by an industry alliance instead of a single vendor with a patent pool. The earlier article on VP9 found real reasons that pitch never translated into dominant adoption. AV1 is a genuinely different story on one specific axis: hardware decode support is moving fast enough, and Netflix's own numbers are strong enough, that the "should you use it" question actually has a real, current answer rather than a stalled one.

TL;DR:

• AV1 (AOMedia Video 1) is a royalty-free codec built by the Alliance for Open Media, whose founding members include Google, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, a broader industry base than VP9 ever had.
• Netflix's own reported numbers: AV1 sessions use one-third less bandwidth than both AVC and HEVC, score 4.3 VMAF points higher than AVC and 0.9 higher than HEVC, and cut buffering interruptions by 45%. AV1 now carries about 30% of all Netflix streaming volume.
• Hardware decode is the real difference from VP9's story: Apple shipped its first AV1 hardware decoder in the iPhone 15 Pro's A17 Pro chip, standard from the iPhone 16 onward, alongside Android 11+ and major silicon vendors (Qualcomm, MediaTek, Broadcom).
• The real cost is on the encoding side, not decoding: AV1 is meaningfully more CPU/GPU-intensive to encode than H.264 or H.265, which makes it a stronger fit for encode-once-serve-many workloads (VOD, large live audiences) than for cost-sensitive real-time encoding at the edge.
• AIOZ Stream doesn't support AV1 today, confirmed directly against its API documentation: only H.264 (max 4K) and H.265 (max 8K) are listed as supported codecs.

What AV1 actually is

AV1 is a royalty-free video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium whose founding and steering members include Google, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and most major browser and silicon vendors. That's the meaningful structural difference from VP9, which was largely a Google-led effort with narrower industry backing. AV1's design goal is straightforward: meaningfully better compression than H.264 or H.265 at a given quality level, without the patent-pool licensing costs that shaped H.265's fragmented adoption, covered in the earlier codec-basics article. The engineering is genuinely more advanced than VP9's, but the bigger difference in 2026 isn't the codec's technical design, it's who's actually behind it and building hardware for it.

The real numbers, from Netflix directly

Netflix has published its own AV1 rollout data, and the figures are specific rather than directional. AV1 streaming sessions use one-third less bandwidth than both AVC (H.264) and HEVC (H.265) while scoring 4.3 VMAF points higher than AVC and 0.9 points higher than HEVC, the industry-standard perceptual quality metric covered in the transcoding basics article. That combination, meaningfully lower bandwidth and meaningfully higher measured quality at the same time, translated into a reported 45% reduction in buffering interruptions for viewers. AV1 now accounts for roughly 30% of all Netflix streaming volume, positioning it as the platform's second-most-used codec and, per Netflix's own reporting, on track to become its most-used format. That's not a lab benchmark, it's production traffic at a scale few platforms will ever operate at, which makes it a genuinely strong data point rather than a vendor's marketing claim.

Hardware decode: the real difference from VP9's story

VP9's adoption problem, documented directly in the earlier article, was largely about decode support never reaching universal hardware acceleration, leaving software decoding as the fallback on a meaningful share of devices, with the battery and performance cost that implies. AV1 is moving faster on exactly this axis. Apple shipped its first AV1 hardware decoder in the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, built into the A17 Pro chip, and hardware AV1 decode is now standard across the iPhone 16 and iPhone 17 lines on the A18 and A19 chips. Combined with AV1 support across YouTube-compatible smart TVs, Android 11 and up, and major silicon vendors including Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Broadcom, that's a materially faster hardware rollout than VP9 ever achieved, even though hardware decode support is still uneven across older devices still in active use. The practical implication: a platform serving a mostly-modern device base can lean on AV1 today with real hardware decode behind it; a platform with a long tail of older hardware still needs a fallback codec, but that fallback conversation is now about coverage of the remaining minority, not the majority.

The real cost is on encoding, not decoding

The trade-off that actually matters when deciding to adopt AV1 sits on the encoding side, not the decoding side that gets most of the hardware-support headlines. AV1 encoding is meaningfully more CPU- and GPU-intensive than H.264 or H.265 at comparable quality settings, especially at the slower, quality-focused presets that capture AV1's compression advantage most fully. That's a real, structural trade-off, not a minor inconvenience: real-time encoding for live streaming at the edge still tends to favor H.264 or H.265 specifically because AV1's encoding cost cuts against the low-latency, resource-constrained environment live encoding runs in. Where AV1 earns its cost back clearly is the opposite pattern, encode once on capable server hardware, then deliver that single encoded asset to a large audience, VOD catalogs, webinars, and large one-to-many live events all fit this shape well, since the one-time encoding cost gets amortized across every viewer's bandwidth savings rather than repeated per session.

Does AIOZ Stream support it

No, checked directly against AIOZ Stream's own API documentation rather than assumed: the documented codec list for the video_config.codec field is exactly two values, h264 and h265, with H.264 capped at 4K and H.265 at 8K, the same caps covered in the 4K/8K encoding article. No AV1 option exists in that field today, the same gap already found for VP9. Given the encoding-cost trade-off above, that's a reasonable, defensible engineering priority for a platform this size to have made, adding AV1 encode support isn't just a checkbox, it means absorbing meaningfully higher compute cost per transcoding job across the platform's entire pipeline, not a small config change. For a project evaluating AIOZ Stream today with an AV1 requirement already locked in, that requirement isn't currently satisfiable on this platform, worth confirming directly before committing rather than assuming a royalty-free, increasingly standard codec is supported everywhere by default.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is AV1?
A royalty-free video codec built by the Alliance for Open Media, a consortium including Google, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, designed to compress video more efficiently than H.264 or H.265.

Is AV1 actually better than H.265?
By Netflix's own reported measurements, yes on quality and bandwidth: 0.9 VMAF points higher and one-third less bandwidth than HEVC in production streaming. The trade-off is a meaningfully higher encoding compute cost.

Which devices support AV1 hardware decode?
iPhone 15 Pro and newer (A17 Pro chip onward), Android 11 and up, most YouTube-compatible smart TVs, and major silicon from Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Broadcom. Older devices still rely on slower software decoding.

Is AV1 harder or slower to encode than H.264?
Yes, meaningfully so, especially at slower, quality-maximizing presets. That's why real-time live encoding still tends to favor H.264 or H.265, while AV1 fits encode-once-serve-many workloads better.

Does AIOZ Stream support AV1?
No. Its documented codec list is limited to H.264 (max 4K) and H.265 (max 8K), confirmed directly against the API docs, the same gap already found for VP9.

Should a new platform use AV1 today?
Depends on the workload. VOD and large one-to-many live audiences benefit most, since one encode serves many viewers. Real-time, resource-constrained live encoding still leans toward H.264/H.265 given AV1's higher encoding cost.

Related Reading

• Video Container Formats Explained: WebM's restricted, royalty-free codec set, the container AV1 most commonly ships in for web delivery
• Video Transcoding Basics: H.264 vs H.265 vs VP9: why VP9's similar royalty-free pitch never reached the same adoption AV1 is now achieving
• How to Encode 4K/8K Video via API: H.264 vs H.265: the exact codec options and resolution caps AIOZ Stream supports today
• How to Build a Video Bitrate Ladder: how codec choice interacts with the rest of the encoding ladder
• How Video Segmentation and M3U8 Manifests Work: the delivery layer any codec's output gets packaged into
• AIOZ Stream Developer Guide: the full API surface the video_config.codec field is part of

References

• TVTechnology: AV1 Open Video Codec Now Powers 30% of Netflix Streaming: the VMAF, bandwidth, and buffering figures quoted above, reporting Netflix's own published data
• Bitmovin: Apple AV1 Support: the iPhone 15 Pro/A17 Pro hardware decode details cited above
• Red5: AV1 vs H.264 in 2026: the encoding-cost trade-off cited above