AV1 is an open, royalty-free video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media, a group including major technology companies. It's designed to outperform H.264 and H.265 in compression efficiency.
Why "royalty-free" matters
Unlike H.265, which involves licensing fees for certain commercial uses, AV1 is free to implement — a major reason browsers and large platforms have invested heavily in adopting it.
Compression efficiency
AV1 can deliver comparable quality to H.265 at a noticeably lower bitrate, which is valuable for reducing bandwidth costs and improving playback on slower connections.
The trade-off: hardware support
AV1 decoding is more computationally demanding, and dedicated hardware decoders are still rolling out across devices. Older hardware may need to decode it in software, using more power and processing.
Tip
If a device struggles specifically with AV1 content but plays H.264/H.265 fine, that's a hardware decoding limitation, not a network issue.