Netflix announced this week that it has started broadcasting the films and series that it hosts with the new AV1 codec, a codec that promises greater efficiency, specifically 20% compared to VP9, the codec used so far on Android for these purposes .
For now, only “selected titles” are available with the AV1 codec for users who wish to reduce their use of mobile data by activating the data saving option, so hopefully this voluntary partial deployment will help the platform to evaluate how beneficial this change is for users, as well as helping the new codec achieve greater popularity.
Netflix has not shared data about what the AV1 codec offers to users, so it will be difficult for them to discern whether or not they need to use it, but the simple fact that they have adopted it for this type of transmission is already a message in itself. same to be valued.
As this codec becomes more popular, it is expected that all platforms share this same codec to reduce compatibility problems that we can find today, for example Safari does not support videos at 4K resolution of YouTube due to the lack support for VP9, while Google does not broadcast on HEVC for videos in that resolution, something that AV1 should fix once and for all.
