After successfully testing the new AV1 streaming codec on Android mobile devices since February 2020, Netflix said it will now use the technology to stream 4K video to PlayStation 4 Pro game consoles and certain Android TV-powered smart TVs that support AV1. 

"We want our members to have brilliant playback experiences, and our players are designed to adapt to the changing network conditions," reads a Netflix blog post jointly penned by a gaggle of company engineers. 

"When the current condition cannot sustain the current video quality, our players can switch to a lower bitrate stream to reduce the chance of a playback interruption. Given AV1 consumes less bandwidth for any given quality level, our players are able to sustain the video quality for a longer period of time and do not need to switch to a lower bitrate stream as much as before," the post added. 

On some TVs using AV1, the engineers added, "noticeable drops in quality were reduced by as much as 38%."

AV1's improvements come at a cost--computer processing power must be upgraded on streaming hardware in order to support it. 

Google, which jointly developed AV1 with Netflix, is down for the plan. 

Netflix said its initial launch fo AV1 will be to "a number of AV1 capable TVs, as well as TVs connected with PS4 Pro." Google mandated earlier this year to OEM smart TV companies who license its Android TV operating system that they start building AV1 support into their sets. So presumably, the TVs Netflix refers to are Android TV/Google TV flavored. 

Notably, the top maker of connected TV OS in the U.S., Roku, is said to be resisting AV1 hardware upgrades. Roku executives have gone on record saying their smart TV original equipment maker relationships depend on Roku keeping the hardware requirements needed to run its OS minimal. 

Currently, Roku is at odds with Google over a new contract to support the YouTube and YouTube TV apps on its platform. A key issue in that dispute is reportedly Google's insistence that Roku get with the program on AV1 so that YouTube can start distributing 4K video via the codec more widely. 

Online video tech company Vimeo said it has joined the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) as a promoter member.

The move adds IAC-owned Vimeo to the backers of AV1, a new royalty-free video codec that is billed as being at least 30% more efficient than current-gen codecs such as HEVC and VP9. Some big names behind AV1 include Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft.

AV1 made its big splash at last month’s NAB show in Las Vegas.

RELATED: Royalty-Free AV1 Codec Turned Loose

Though hardware support for AV1 considered to be about two years away, much of the early implementations will be via software in browsers. The bulk of AV1 use cases will also center on OTT video, making it a good fit for Vimeo’s platform.

NAB 2018: Hardware Support a Big Step Ahead for AV1

"Vimeo is excited and proud to join the Alliance for Open Media,” Naren Venkataraman, head of technology at Vimeo, said in a statement. “We look forward to working alongside AOMedia members to shape the next-generation codec that will unify the industry and fundamentally improve video experiences for creators and viewers everywhere."

"We’re pleased to welcome Vimeo to the Alliance for Open Media, reflecting the importance of online and live streaming engagement to achieve broad industry adoption," added Gabe Frost, a Microsoft exec who is also executive director for the Alliance for Open Media. "We look forward to Vimeo's contributions to this significant initiative, which will open the door to a new era of openness and interoperability for internet video." 

Facebook has moved a step forward with its support for AV1, the royalty-free codec that aims to deliver bandwidth efficiencies that are about 30% better than current-gen codecs such as HEVC and VP9.

Facebook, which recently claimed to have produced bit-rate efficiencies of 50% in AV1 benchmark studies, announced in this blog post that it has added trial support for the new format to Facebook video. Facebook timed the announcement with this week’s Video@Scale event.

Facebook: Tests Show AV1 Streaming Performance is Exceeding Expectations

The AV1 video trial, Facebook noted, “allows engineers and the general public to view sample AV1 content today.”

RELATED: Royalty-Free AV1 Codec Turned Loose

For the test, Facebook is delivering AV1-encoded video over MPEG-DASH on Chrome Canary, an experimental version of the Chrome browser. The initial trial is using an earlier version of AV1, but Facebook plans to switch to the official AV1 release version once major web browsers such as Chrome and Firefox have implemented the new codec.

Facebook also points out that AV1 has some caveats today, as it requires longer encoding times than current alternatives because of the increased complexity.

To help to overcome the slow performance of the AV1 encoder, Facebook said it used a “segment-based encoding approach” that splits the video into smaller segment files.

“In the context of distributed video encoding and processing, per-segment tasks are executed in parallel for every video segment of a given input video so that it allows us to speed up the overall AV1 encoding almost linearly with the number of tasks allocated to the encoding cluster,” Facebook engineers Daniel Baulig and Yu Liu noted, along with steps to take to view AV1-encoded sample videos on Facebook.

Initial AV1 implementations of AV1 will be done in software, with support on chips and other hardware expected to be another two years out.

NAB 2018: Hardware Support a Big Step Ahead for AV1

Facebook, one of several major online video players putting its weight behind AV1, a new royalty-free codec, has posted test results showing that AV1’s bitrate efficiencies are exceeding expectations.

RELATED: Royalty-Free AV1 Codec Turned Loose

As a backdrop, AV1 is being billed as a codec that is 30% more efficient than current-gen codecs, such as HEVC and VP9. The Alliance for Open Media, the group behind AV1 with members that include Facebook, Google, Netflix and Amazon and was founded in 2015, released the 1.0 version of the codec last month.

NAB 2018: Hardware Support a Big Step Ahead for AV1

In a blog post, Facebook software engineer Yu Liu said the results are 50%-plus when Facebook tested AV1 using about 400 of the most-viewed public videos (primarily with SD and HD files) on the social media platform versus performance on “standard reference software encoders.”

“Our test examined AV1's performance vs. practical open source video encoders that can be deployed to a practical production system, rather than merely testing efficiency vs. standard reference software encoders (i.e., H.264/AVC Joint Model or JM),” Liu noted. “By structuring the test this way, we were able to show how the codec will perform in a true production environment compared with current widely used alternatives, such as x264 and libvpx-vp9.”

In those tests, AV1 surged past its stated goal of 30% better compression versus VP9, and achieves gains of up to 50.3%, 46.2% and 34.0%, compared to x264 main profile, x264 high profile and libvpx-vp9, respectively, he added.

Though the tests focused on SD and HD, Liu said the conclusion is that that AV1 will deliver “even higher efficiency gains with UHD/4K and 8K content.”

As for next steps, he said Facebook will “gradually” serve up AV1 content on the web for popular Facebook videos as Chrome and Firefox browsers implement support.

AV1: Origins and the Road Ahead

Facebook released those results Wednesday just as a large panel consisting of AOMedia members gathered at the NAB Show in Las Vegas to shed more light on the origins and plans for AV1.

As for those origins, Gabe Frost, AOMedia’s executive director and principal engineering manager for Microsoft’s operating systems group, said the conversation got started more than three years ago when it was doing some work around codecs that led to conversation with Google about another royalty-free codec, VP9.

He said Microsoft was struggling with the notion of pouring R&D into products that used video codecs and stymied by the speed of adoption.

“We felt we had to create a new way of going forward…and a new business model,” he said.

Matt Frost, AOMedia’s founding board member and head of strategy and partnerships at Google, agreed that there was a need for a royalty-free, next-gen codec that could scale across web technologies, with the codec itself serving as the foundation for companies to innovate on top of and apply to products that compete in the market.

A royalty-free approach brings a level of certainty to business models and enables companies to go “all-in” and build the ecosystem, noted Zach Hamm, an AOMedia founding board member, and director of media and display strategy and planning at chipmaker Intel Corp. (initial AV1 implementations of AV1 will be done in software; support on chips and other hardware is probably two years out).

“I’d say free is a really great price,” Mark Watson, another AOMedia founding board member and director of streaming standards at Netflix, said.

Netflix, which offers 4K content and is interested in more efficient codecs to help it lower streaming costs and deliver higher-quality streams in parts of the world with more limited bandwidth connectivity, expects to start delivering AV1 streams on web browsers later this year, Watson said.

Google’s Frost also acknowledged that codecs that use royalty-based models will be paying attention to AV1. “Are they going to be affected by this? Yes they are,” Google’s Frost said.

It’s still not clear what the other codec-facing patent pools think of AV1. “We haven’t heard much from them…so it’s hard to get into their minds,” David Rudin, AOMedia founding board member, and president, Joint Development Foundation LLC and assistant general counsel at Microsoft, said.

In the meantime, Frost said Google is optimizing its encoding technology for VP1 today as well as for software decoders for Chrome and Firefox to help with video playback for the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Facebook.

Software-based implementations will give AV1 a rolling start, though time will tell how that limits capabilities like refresh rates and resolution. “Hardware will be a key enabler” for AV1, Intel’ Hamm said, predicting that hardware rollouts will arrive within 18 to 24 months, starting on the decoder side.

Also in the early going AV1 will focus on OTT streaming applications and won’t be aggressively pushing for adoption in the broadcast TV sector, Google’s Frost said.

At the same time, there has been interest from broadcasters and discussions are happening, he said. Notably, ATSC 3.0, the next-gen broadcast transmission standard, does aim to support OTT-like capabilities, so there could be some potential alignments with AV1 further down the road. 

Las Vegas -- AV1, the royalty-free, next-gen video codec from the heavily backed Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), is initially targeting web browsers, including Mozilla’s Firefox and Google Chrome, and a small but growing amount of content.  

But a major move that will deliver widescale adoption major move – support in hardware and chipsets -- is about two years out.  

Hardware support will likely come in 2020, as chip development typically takes two to three years, Matt Frost, head of strategy and partnerships for Chrome Media at Google, one of AOMedia’s members, said here Wednesday as an opening keynoter at the NAB Show's first Streaming Summit.  

AOMedia, which issued the 1.0 release of VP1 earlier this month, has strived to optimize the new codec to make hardware adoption easier, even if seeing it appear in chips won’t happen overnight, he explained.  

RELATED: Royalty-Free AV1 Codec Turned Loose 

He expects AV1’s path to be similar to the one taken by VP9, another royalty-free coded originated by Google that was released in 2013 and initially added to popular browsers like Chrome and Firefox, followed by adoption by Google’s corporate cousin, YouTube, as well as Netflix.  

Frost said small volumes of video in the AV1 format, largely for testing purposes, is already available via YouTube.  

The 1.0 release is the first stage in this important process. “We have the code; it’s frozen,” Frost said.  

AV1 is being billed as a next-gen codec that is 30% more efficient that current-gen codecs such as HEVC and VP9.  

Dan Rayburn, the conference chairman of the NAB Streaming Summit who moderated the discussion, said he views AV1 as a successor to HEVC, rather than a replacement.  

Frost acknowledged that it’s a “pain” to switch to a new codec, and that it’s costly to support multiple formats. But he likewise believes that the value will come from the bit rate efficiencies that will come with AV1. YouTube’s adoption of VP1, he said, enabled faster start times, smoother streaming and, in some cases, a way to bump up the resolution that consumers received on their devices. 

“And to do all of that while saving money,” Frost said, adding later that the APIs and tools for VP9 and AV1 share some helpful similarities and could help ease that transition path.  

As for the bandwidth-saving potential for AV1, Frost noted that Netflix showed off 720p streaming at a mere 207 kbps at the AV1 launch party.  

Still, a big question many have about AV1 is whether it will become the target of lawsuits from other holders of intellectual property.  

Frost said there was a major aim to avoid potential legal entanglements with other patent holders and patent pools, as AV1 does not use any patents that aren’t derived from those involved in the AOMedia organization, which includes Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook among its members.  

AOMedia has also done its due diligence and put “a lot of rigor” into the intellectual review of AV1, Frost said, noting that there was a deep review done internally as well as another level of review with dedicated outside counsel.  

And here’s the just-in-case -- AOMedia and its members have also set up a fund for the defense of AV1 against any possible lawsuits suits that emerge and allege patent infringement.  

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Adding another big name to those that are getting behind the emerging AV1 video codec, Facebook has joined the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) as a founding member and has secured a spot on the organization’s board.

Other companies that are on that level at the organization include ARM, Cisco Systems, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix and nVidia.

Facebook is joining the org and gaining influence on the direction of the AV1 standard as video becomes an increasingly vital component of the social media giant’s business strategy.

RELATED: Facebook Willing to Experiment with Video

AV1 is being billed as a bandwidth-efficient, royalty-free video codec that is optimized for the internet and compete with or complement others that are trying to drive down the bit-rate requirements for OTT video. 

“For very large OTT companies, it's a potential competitor. For most other sites, it's looking more and more like the next generation,” Jan Ozer, video producer and consultant, explained in this AV1 status update in the September issue of Streaming Media.

AOMedia was launched in 2015, and announced the public avaialbity of its source code in April 2016.

“As the amount of video being watched and shared online continues to grow, we are committed to making the video experience even better,” Mike Coward, engineering director at Facebook, said in a statement. “By joining the Alliance for Open Media at the highest level, Facebook can directly participate in the advancement of technologies to help achieve this mission.”