By ByteBot
Netflix announced this week that the AV1 open video codec now powers 30% of all streaming on its platform—a milestone that marks the moment open video standards beat proprietary licensing. The company expects AV1 to overtake H.264 as Netflix’s most-used codec soon, validating the Alliance for Open Media’s royalty-free approach after seven years of slow progress since the 2018 specification release.
This matters because it’s production proof at massive scale. Moreover, Netflix streams billions of minutes monthly, and switching 30% of that traffic to AV1 required real performance wins, not lab benchmarks. For developers building video applications, this signals that AV1 has crossed the viability threshold—if it works for Netflix, the economics and technology are ready for serious deployment.
Real Performance Wins: 45% Fewer Buffering Issues
The technical improvements aren’t marketing claims—they’re production metrics from Netflix’s actual network. AV1 delivers 45% fewer buffering interruptions compared to both H.264/AVC and HEVC while using one-third less bandwidth. Quality scores (VMAF) are 4.3 points higher than AVC and 0.9 points higher than HEVC.
These numbers matter because they’re measured on real devices streaming over real networks, not synthetic benchmarks. Furthermore, academic studies back this up: AV1 outperforms H.264 by 33% at 1080p resolution, climbing to 81% at 8K. At 4K—where compression efficiency matters most—AV1 beats HEVC by 43.9%.
For developers, this translates directly to lower CDN costs (33% bandwidth reduction) and better user experience (45% fewer buffering events). That’s the kind of improvement that justifies the engineering investment Netflix made to deploy AV1 at scale.
2025: The Year AV1 Actually Shipped
AV1’s seven-year journey from specification to 30% adoption sounds slow, but 2025 marks the acceleration point. However, Netflix hit three major milestones this year alone.
March 2025: Launched AV1-HDR10+ streaming, enabling high dynamic range content delivery with the efficiency of AV1 compression. Netflix now has 85% of its HDR catalog available in AV1 format, targeting 100% coverage soon.
July 2025: Productized Film Grain Synthesis globally. This technical achievement preserves the artistic integrity of cinematic film grain while dramatically reducing bitrate requirements—solving a problem that plagued previous codecs.
December 2025: Announced the 30% milestone this week, with AV1 now second only to H.264 in total streaming volume. Netflix expects AV1 to claim the top spot in the near future.
The pattern matters more than the timeline. All three milestones happened in 2025, suggesting AV1 crossed the “deployment viability” threshold where major platforms can confidently invest at scale. This isn’t slow adoption—it’s the inflection point.
The Open Standard Victory Over Patent Licensing
AV1 is developed by the Alliance for Open Media—a consortium of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Netflix, and Amazon—and is completely royalty-free. In contrast, this setup differs sharply from H.264’s MPEG LA licensing fees and HEVC’s complex patent pools that created years of uncertainty and slowed adoption.
The economics are simple: H.264 requires per-device or per-stream licensing fees. HEVC involves multiple patent pools with uncertain costs that vary by deployment. Consequently, AV1 costs nothing. For Netflix streaming billions of minutes, those licensing savings add up fast. For developers, royalty-free means no surprise legal costs as your product scales.
The consortium backing matters too. These aren’t startups that might get acquired or change terms—these are the largest tech companies ensuring long-term stability. When Apple, Google, and Microsoft agree on an open standard, that’s as close to a guarantee as you get in tech.
The Reality Check: Only 10% of Devices Support AV1
Despite Netflix’s success, hardware support remains the bottleneck. Only about 10% of devices globally have hardware AV1 decoding as of 2025. Moreover, software decoding is CPU-intensive and drains mobile battery 2-3x faster than H.264 hardware decode.
Netflix succeeds because they encode content in multiple formats and serve based on device capabilities: H.264 baseline for older devices, HEVC where supported, and AV1 for modern hardware. Recent devices with AV1 support include iPhone 15 Pro (which doubled total AV1 adoption when it launched), Pixel 6+, Galaxy S21+, and Android flagships with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2+ chipsets.
The challenge is that mid and low-tier devices—most of the global market—still lack hardware AV1 support. Hardware is coming (2025-2027 for widespread encoding support), but developers can’t assume universal AV1 playback yet.
When to Choose AV1 vs Sticking with H.264
Here’s the developer reality check: AV1 encoding is 15-80x slower than H.264. That’s not a typo. The superior compression comes at a massive computational cost that only makes sense at scale.
Choose AV1 when:
- You have high-traffic VoD content (millions of views) where encoding costs amortize over time
- Your target audience uses modern devices (2021+ phones, recent smart TVs)
- You’re delivering 4K or 8K content (largest compression gains)
- Bandwidth costs are significant enough that CDN savings justify encoding investment
Stick with H.264 or HEVC when:
- You need real-time streaming or low latency (AV1 encoding is too slow)
- You’re running a small-scale deployment (under 100K views—encoding costs don’t amortize)
- Your audience is mostly on older devices (pre-2021 hardware)
- You’re building video editing workflows (AV1 decode requires 15x more CPU than H.264)
The economics work for Netflix, YouTube, and Meta because they stream at massive scale. For everyone else, you need a fallback strategy with device-based codec selection.
Key Takeaways
- Netflix’s 30% AV1 adoption validates open video standards at production scale
- Real performance wins: 45% fewer buffering issues, 33% bandwidth reduction
- 2025 marks the inflection point with three major milestones (March HDR, July Film Grain, December 30%)
- Hardware support remains limited to ~10% of devices but growing rapidly
- AV1 makes sense for high-traffic VoD on modern devices; H.264/HEVC for real-time and broad compatibility
- The open standard won: royalty-free codec beating proprietary licensing at Netflix scale
