A new tech blog from Netflix highlights the importance of the AV1 open video codec, which now powers about 30% of all streaming on the platform, and discusses a variety of opportunities to expand its current use, which is primarily for VOD content.
The blog by Liwei Guo, Zhi Li, Sheldon Radford, Jeff Watts comes at a time when AV2 is on the horizon.
“Looking ahead, we are excited about the forthcoming release of AV2, announced by the Alliance for Open Media for the end of 2025,” they posted. “AV2 is poised to set a new benchmark for compression efficiency and streaming capabilities, building on the solid foundation laid by AV1. At Netflix, we remain committed to adopting the best open technologies to delight our members around the globe. While AV2 represents the future of streaming, AV1 is very much the present — serving as the backbone of our platform and powering exceptional entertainment experiences across a vast and ever-expanding ecosystem of devices.”
The blog revisits Netflix’s AV1 journey to date, highlights emerging use cases, and shares adoption trends across the device ecosystem. It noted that since entering the streaming business in 2007, Netflix has primarily relied on H.264/AVC as its streaming format.
“However, we quickly recognized that a modern, open codec would benefit not only Netflix, but the entire multimedia industry,” they wrote. “In 2015, together with a group of like-minded industry leaders, Netflix co-founded the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) to develop and promote next generation, open source media technologies. The AV1 codec became the first major project of this collaboration, with ambitious goals: to deliver significant improvements in compression efficiency over state-of-the-art codecs, and to introduce rich features that enable new use cases. After three years of collaborative development, AV1 was officially released in 2018.”
The blog noted that “AV1’s superior compression efficiency was especially valuable for mobile users, many of whom are mindful of their data usage and network conditions. By adopting AV1, we were able to deliver noticeably better video quality at lower bitrates....Launching AV1 support on Android in 2020 marked a significant step forward for Netflix on mobile, making high-quality streaming more accessible and enjoyable for members everywhere.”
Based on that successful launch, the streamer then expanded AV1 support to smart TV and large screen devices. “This collaborative effort enabled our AV1 streaming to TV devices in late 2021. Shortly thereafter, we expanded AV1 streaming to web browsers (in 2022) and continued to broaden device support,” the post explained. “In 2023, this included Apple devices with the introduction of AV1 hardware support in the new M3 and A17 Pro chips.”
Today, AV1 is the streamer’s second most-used codec and it is on track to become number one very soon.
In part this represents its “superior” compression technology for delivering 4K and high frame rate experience. “On average, AV1 streaming sessions achieve VMAF scores¹ that are 4.3 points higher than AVC and 0.9 points higher than HEVC sessions,” the blog said. “At the same time, AV1 sessions use one-third less bandwidth than both AVC and HEVC, resulting in 45% fewer buffering interruptions.”
The blog also explained that the codec has been important in their efforts to provide more immersive experience with HDR and other features.
“In March 2025, we launched AV1 HDR streaming,” the post explained. “We chose HDR10+ as the HDR format for its use of dynamic metadata, which enabled us to adapt the tone mapping per device in a scene-dependent manner. As anticipated, the combination of AV1 and HDR10+ allows us to deliver images with greater detail, more vibrant colors, and an overall heightened sense of immersion for our members. At the moment, 85% of our HDR catalog (from the perspective of view-hours) has AV1-HDR10+ coverage, and this number is expected to reach 100% in the next couple of months.”
The codec has also allowed them to incorporate film grain, which has been difficult to faithfully render in digital video.
“The AV1 specification incorporates a unique solution called Film Grain Synthesis (FGS),” they explained. “Instead of encoding grain as part of every frame, the grain is stripped out before encoding and then resynthesized at the decoder using parameters sent in the bitstream, delivering a realistic cinematic film grain experience without the usual data costs…In July 2025, we successfully productized AV1 FGS, and the results were astonishing: AV1 with FGS could deliver videos with cinematic film grain at a bitrate well within the capabilities of typical household internet connections. For non-FGS AV1 encodings, even at much higher bitrate, they may not be able to achieve comparable quality.”
Looking forward the post noted that they have primarily used AV1 for VOD but the platform sees “significant opportunities for AV1 beyond traditional VOD streaming”, including the use of "AV1 in live streaming, as we believe it could help further scale Netflix’s live programming.”
One use might be for events where Netflix is delivering content, such as live sports, to tens of millions of viewers simultaneously.
Another might be “customizable graphics overlay: for live sport events such as football, tennis and boxing, graphics overlays have become an integral part of the member experience — from embedding game statistics to delivering sponsorships. AV1 offers an opportunity to make the graphics highly customizable: layered coding is supported in AV1’s main profile, allowing encoding the main content in the base layer, and graphics in the enhancement layer, and easily swapping out one version of the enhancement layer with another.”
The full post is available here.
