Netflix starts streaming over the AV1 codec to reduce data consumption

We've mentioned the AV1 codec a couple of times already. AV1 is a royalty-free codec and offers improved compression compared to vp9 or hevc, the video bandwidth reduction can run upwards to 30 percent, without you seeing a difference. The best thing yet, this is a royalty-free model. 

It is stated that AV1 can approximately be 30% more efficient than h.265, which the streaming service currently uses for the users of its 4K subscription. Compared to vp9, it would be 20% more efficient.

-- Netflix --

Today we are excited to announce that Netflix has started streaming AV1 to our Android mobile app. AV1 is a high performance, royalty-free video codec that provides 20% improved compression efficiency over our VP9† encodes. AV1 is made possible by the wide-ranging industry commitment of expertise and intellectual property within the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), of which Netflix is a founding member.

Our support for AV1 represents Netflix’s continued investment in delivering the most efficient and highest quality video streams. For our mobile environment, AV1 follows on our work with VP9, which we released as part of our mobile encodes in 2016 and further optimized with shot-based encodes in 2018.

While our goal is to roll out AV1 on all of our platforms, we see a good fit for AV1’s compression efficiency in the mobile space where cellular networks can be unreliable, and our members have limited data plans. Selected titles are now available to stream in AV1 for customers who wish to reduce their cellular data usage by enabling the “Save Data” feature.

Our AV1 support on Android leverages the open-source dav1d decoder built by the VideoLAN, VLC, and FFmpeg communities and sponsored by the Alliance for Open Media. Here we have optimized dav1d so that it can play Netflix content, which is 10-bit color. In the spirit of making AV1 widely available, we are sponsoring an open-source effort to optimize 10-bit performance further and make these gains available to all.

As codec performance improves over time, we plan to expand our AV1 usage to more use cases and are now also working with device and chipset partners to extend this into hardware.