Youtube is experimenting with AV1 transcoded videos on its platform. Beta version of browsers that support it shows AV1 with a tiny small selection of just fourteen videos.

AV1 currently is supported (beta) in Chrome 70 as well as the nightly builds of Firefox 63 in which media.av1.enabled and media.mediasource.experimental.enabled must be enabled. This is news because AV1 is a royalty-free video coding format with a lot of potential in quality and saving bandwidth. AV1 offers improved compression compared to vp9 or hevc, the video bandwidth reduction can run upwards to 30 to 40 percent, without you seeing a difference.

Participants (you can check it out in test tube yourself) should activate 'Prefer AV1 for SD' in the settings. Mind you that currently only a resolution lower than 480p is supported, higher resolutions YouTube still shows VP9. The videos are encoded at high bit rates to test the performance of the decoder.

AV1 is developed based on an Alliance that includes parties like Google, Netflix, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. It could be the next big royalty-free codec for the future as an alternative for HEVC and VP9.