AV1 — Now Powering 30% of Netflix Streaming
Liwei Guo, Zhi Li, Sheldon Radford, Jeff Watts
Streaming video has turn out to be an integral a part of our every day lives. At Netflix, our prime precedence is delivering the very best leisure expertise to our members, no matter their gadgets or community circumstances. One of many key applied sciences enabling that is AV1, a contemporary, open video codec that’s quickly remodeling each how we stream content material and the way customers expertise it. In the present day, AV1 powers roughly 30% of all Netflix viewing, marking a significant milestone in our efforts to carry extra environment friendly and higher-quality streaming to our members.
On this put up, we’ll revisit Netflix’s AV1 journey thus far, spotlight rising use circumstances, and share adoption traits throughout the gadget ecosystem. Having witnessed AV1’s vital influence，and with AV2 on the horizon, we’re extra excited than ever about how open codecs will proceed to revolutionize streaming for everybody.
AV1: A Trendy, Open Codec
Since coming into the streaming enterprise in 2007, Netflix has primarily relied on H.264/AVC as its streaming format. Nevertheless, we shortly acknowledged {that a} fashionable, open codec would profit not solely Netflix, however the whole multimedia {industry}. In 2015, along with a gaggle of like-minded {industry} leaders, Netflix co-founded the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) to develop and promote subsequent era, open supply media applied sciences. The AV1 codec grew to become the primary main challenge of this collaboration, with formidable targets: to ship vital enhancements in compression effectivity over state-of-the-art codecs, and to introduce wealthy options that allow new use circumstances. After three years of collaborative growth, AV1 was formally launched in 2018.
Netflix’s AV1 Journey: From Android to TVs and Past
Piloting on Android Cellular
After we first got down to carry AV1 streaming to Netflix members, Android was the perfect start line. Android’s flexibility allowed us to shortly combine a software program AV1 decoder utilizing the environment friendly dav1d library, which was already optimized for ARM chipsets in cell gadgets.
AV1’s superior compression effectivity was particularly worthwhile for cell customers, a lot of whom are aware of their information utilization and community circumstances. By adopting AV1, we have been capable of ship noticeably higher video high quality at decrease bitrates. For members counting on mobile information, this meant crisper pictures with fewer compression artifacts, even when bandwidth was restricted. Launching AV1 assist on Android in 2020 marked a big step ahead for Netflix on cell, making high-quality streaming extra accessible and pleasant for members all over the place.
Entrance-and-Heart for Netflix VOD Streaming
The success of our AV1 launch on Android proved its worth for Netflix streaming, motivating us to broaden assist to good TVs and different large-screen gadgets, the place most of our members watch their favourite exhibits.
Good TVs depend upon {hardware} decoders for environment friendly high-quality playback. We labored intently with gadget producers and SoC distributors to certify these gadgets, making certain they’re each conformant and performant. This collaborative effort enabled our AV1 streaming to TV gadgets in late 2021. Shortly thereafter, we expanded AV1 streaming to internet browsers (in 2022) and continued to broaden gadget assist. In 2023, this included Apple gadgets with the introduction of AV1 {hardware} assist within the new M3 and A17 Professional chips.
As extra gadgets started delivery with AV1 {hardware} assist, a quickly rising share of our members might take pleasure in the advantages of this superior codec. Mixed with our funding in including AV1 streams throughout the whole catalog, AV1 viewing share has been persistently growing in recent times. In the present day, AV1 accounts for about 30% of all Netflix streaming, making it our second most-used codec — and it’s on observe to turn out to be primary very quickly. The payoff has been substantial.
- Elevating Streaming Expertise Throughout the Board: Massive-screen TVs and different gadgets demand increased bitrates to ship gorgeous 4K, excessive body price (HFR) experiences. AV1’s superior compression effectivity has allowed us to supply these experiences utilizing much less information, making high-quality streaming extra accessible and dependable. On common, AV1 streaming classes obtain VMAF scores¹ which can be 4.3 factors increased than AVC and 0.9 factors increased than HEVC classes. On the identical time, AV1 classes use one-third much less bandwidth than each AVC and HEVC, leading to 45% fewer buffering interruptions. Furthermore, Netflix’s various content material catalog advantages universally from AV1, with enhancements throughout all content material varieties.
- Driving Community Effectivity Worldwide: Netflix streams are delivered by way of our personal content material supply community (Open Join), in partnership with native ISPs across the globe. With greater than 300 million members, Netflix streaming constitutes a non-trivial portion of world web visitors. As a result of AV1 is a extra environment friendly codec, its streams are smaller in dimension (whereas offering even higher visible high quality). By shifting a considerable share of our streaming to AV1, we scale back total web bandwidth consumption, and reduce system and community load for each Netflix and our companions.
Unlocking Superior Experiences
Along with its superior compression effectivity, AV1 was designed to assist a wealthy set of options. As soon as we established a strong framework for the continual growth of AV1 streaming, we shortly shifted our focus in direction of exploring AV1’s distinctive options to unlock much more superior and immersive experiences for our members.
Excessive-Dynamic-Vary(HDR)
HDR brings enhanced element, vivid colours, and larger readability to pictures. As a premium streaming service, Netflix has been a pioneer in adopting HDR, providing HDR streaming since 2016. In March 2025, we launched AV1 HDR streaming. We selected HDR10+ because the HDR format for its use of dynamic metadata, which enabled us to adapt the tone mapping per gadget in a scene-dependent method.
As anticipated, the mixture of AV1 and HDR10+ permits us to ship pictures with larger element, extra vibrant colours, and an total heightened sense of immersion for our members. In the mean time, 85% of our HDR catalog (from the angle of view-hours) has AV1-HDR10+ protection, and this quantity is anticipated to achieve 100% within the subsequent couple of months.
Cinematic Movie Grain
Movie grain is a trademark of the cinematic expertise, extensively used within the film {industry} to boost a movie’s depth, texture, and realism. Nevertheless, as a result of movie grain is inherently random, faithfully representing it in digital video requires a big quantity of knowledge. This presents a singular problem for streaming: proscribing the bitrate may end up in grain that seems unnatural or distorted, whereas growing the bitrate to precisely protect cinematic grain virtually inevitably results in elevated rebuffering. The AV1 specification incorporates a singular resolution referred to as Movie Grain Synthesis (FGS). As an alternative of encoding grain as a part of each body, the grain is stripped out earlier than encoding after which resynthesized on the decoder utilizing parameters despatched within the bitstream, delivering a sensible cinematic movie grain expertise with out the same old information prices.
This method represents a big shift from conventional compression and streaming strategies. Our group invested substantial effort in fine-tuning the media processing pipeline, making certain FGS delivers strong efficiency at scale. In July 2025, we efficiently productized AV1 FGS, and the outcomes have been astonishing: AV1 with FGS might ship movies with cinematic movie grain at a bitrate properly inside the capabilities of typical family web connections. For non-FGS AV1 encodings, even at a lot increased bitrate, they might not be capable of obtain comparable high quality.
Past VOD Streaming
Thus far, our AV1 journey has been primarily on VOD, however we see vital alternatives for AV1 past conventional VOD streaming. On a mission to entertain the world, Netflix has continually explored and established different methods to carry pleasure to our members, and we imagine AV1 might contribute to the success of those new merchandise.
Reside Streaming
Debuting in 2023, reside streaming has skilled fast development at Netflix, turning into a key a part of our streaming choices in simply two quick years. We’re actively evaluating using AV1 in reside streaming, as we imagine it might assist additional scale Netflix’s reside programming:
- Hyper-scale concurrent viewership: Reside streaming at Netflix means delivering content material to tens of hundreds of thousands of viewers concurrently. AV1’s superior compression effectivity might considerably scale back the required bandwidth, enabling us to ship high-quality reside experiences to massive audiences with out compromising video high quality.
- Customizable graphics overlay: for reside sport occasions comparable to soccer, tennis and boxing, graphics overlays have turn out to be an integral a part of the member expertise — from embedding sport statistics to delivering sponsorships. AV1 provides a possibility to make the graphics extremely customizable: layered coding is supported in AV1’s most important profile, permitting encoding the primary content material within the base layer, and graphics within the enhancement layer, and simply swapping out one model of the enhancement layer with one other. We envision that using AV1’s layered coding can enormously simplify the reside streaming workflow and scale back supply prices.
Cloud Gaming
Cloud gaming is a brand new Netflix providing that’s presently within the beta section and is offered to members in choose nations. The sport engines run on cloud servers, whereas the rendered graphics are streamed on to members’ gadgets. By eradicating boundaries and remodeling each Netflix-enabled gadget right into a sport console, Cloud gaming goals to ship a seamless, “play wherever” expertise for our members. For a glimpse of this in motion, watch as Co-CEO Greg Peters and CTO Elizabeth Stone play a spherical of Boggle Social gathering — powered totally by Netflix’s cloud gaming platform!
In contrast to conventional video streaming, cloud gaming requires that each participant motion is mirrored immediately on the display screen to make sure a responsive and immersive expertise. This makes delivering high-quality video frames with extraordinarily low latency, regardless of fluctuating community circumstances, one of many largest challenges in cloud gaming.
Our group is actively engaged on productizing AV1 for cloud gaming. Given AV1’s excessive compression effectivity, we will scale back body sizes, serving to video frames get by way of even when community circumstances turn out to be difficult. This positions AV1 as a promising know-how for enabling a high-quality, low-latency gaming expertise throughout a variety of gadgets.
A Machine Ecosystem United for AV1
Netflix is a streaming firm, and we’ve labored diligently to create extremely environment friendly and standards-conformant AV1 streams for our catalog. Nevertheless, an equally, if no more, necessary think about AV1’s success is the widespread assist from gadget producers. All through our AV1 journey, we’ve been impressed by the unprecedented tempo at which the gadget ecosystem has embraced AV1.
Simply six months after the AV1 specification was finalized, the open-source AV1 decoder library sponsored by AOM, dav1d, was launched. Small, performant, and extremely resource-efficient, dav1d bridged the hole for early adopters like Netflix whereas {hardware} options have been nonetheless in growth. Steady enhancements to its efficiency and compatibility have made dav1d the popular selection for a variety of platforms and sensible functions. In the present day, it serves as Android’s default software program decoder. Moreover, it performs a key position in internet browsers — for Netflix, it powers roughly 40% of our browser playback. This broad adoption has considerably expanded entry to high-quality AV1 streaming, even within the absence of devoted {hardware} decoders.
Netflix maintains a detailed working relationship with gadget producers and SoC distributors, and we’ve witnessed first-hand their enthusiasm for adopting AV1. To make sure optimum streaming efficiency, Netflix has a rigorous certification course of to confirm correct assist for our streaming codecs on gadgets. AV1 was added to this certification course of in 2019, and since then, we’ve seen a gentle enhance within the variety of gadgets with full AV1 decoding capabilities. Over the previous 5 years (2021–2025), 88% of large-screen gadgets, together with TVs, set-top containers, and streaming sticks, submitted for Netflix certification have supported AV1, with the overwhelming majority providing full 4K@60fps functionality. Notably, since 2023, virtually all gadgets we’ve obtained for certification are AV1-capable.
Now we have additionally been impressed by the robustness of AV1 implementations throughout these gadgets. As talked about earlier, FGS is an revolutionary software that departs from conventional codec architectures and was not included in our preliminary full-scale AV1 streaming rollout. After we launched FGS this July, we labored intently with our companions to make sure broad gadget compatibility. We’re happy with the profitable progress made, and AV1 with FGS is now supported throughout a big and rising variety of in-field gadgets.
Wanting Forward: AV1 In the present day, AV2 Tomorrow
As we replicate on our AV1 journey, it’s clear that the codec has already remodeled the streaming expertise for a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of Netflix members worldwide. Due to industry-wide collaboration and fast gadget adoption, AV1 is delivering increased high quality, larger effectivity, and new cinematic options to extra screens than ever earlier than.
Wanting forward, we’re excited in regards to the forthcoming launch of AV2, introduced by the Alliance for Open Media for the tip of 2025. AV2 is poised to set a brand new benchmark for compression effectivity and streaming capabilities, constructing on the stable basis laid by AV1. At Netflix, we stay dedicated to adopting the very best open applied sciences to thrill our members across the globe. Whereas AV2 represents the way forward for streaming, AV1 may be very a lot the current — serving because the spine of our platform and powering distinctive leisure experiences throughout an enormous and ever-expanding ecosystem of gadgets.
Acknowledgement
The success of AV1 at Netflix is the results of the dedication, experience, and collaboration of many groups throughout the corporate — together with Encoding, Purchasers, Machine Certification, Companion Engineering, Knowledge Science & Engineering, Infra, Platform, and so forth.
We might additionally wish to thank Artem Danylenko, Aditya Mavlankar, Anne Aaron, Cyril Concolato, Allan Zhou and Anush Moorthy for his or her worthwhile feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts of this put up.
Footnotes
- These numbers characterize a snapshot of knowledge from November 13, 2025. Precise values might differ barely from each day and throughout totally different areas, relying on the combination of content material, gadgets, and web connectivity.
AV1 — Now Powering 30% of Netflix Streaming was initially printed in Netflix TechBlog on Medium, the place persons are persevering with the dialog by highlighting and responding to this story.
