Katarzyna Petru
The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) has confirmed that the development of the AV2 codec is coming to an end after nearly five years of work. The team creating the standard – including engineers from Netflix, Apple, Google, Meta, and Tencent – plans its final release by the end of 2025.
AV, or AOMedia Video, is a family of modern video codecs developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) – a consortium of technology giants including Netflix, Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Tencent.
The AV1 codecs (and now its successor AV2) were created as an open and free video compression standard, serving as an alternative to paid formats such as HEVC (H.265) or VVC (H.266), which require licensing and patent fees.
What's new in AV2?
According to data presented by Andrey Norkin from Netflix, AV2 provides about 30% higher compression efficiency compared to AV1.
In practice, this means:
up to 28.6% lower bitrate while maintaining the same quality (YUV-PSNR 14:1:1),
up to 32.6% better score in VMAF tests.
As a result, streaming services like Netflix will be able to offer the same image with lower bandwidth consumption or better quality at the same bitrate — which is particularly important for 4K and 8K content.
Performance and Innovations
The research team emphasizes that the advantage of AV2 does not come from a single "revolutionary" feature, but from a series of minor optimizations: larger blocks (superblocks), more accurate image partitioning, and improved motion prediction.
At this stage, artificial intelligence is not a key element of compression, although AOMedia is considering AI/ML-extension in future versions of the codec.
Support for 3D and multiple streams
AV2 naturally supports multi-stream video, that is, multi-layer formats — from classic 3D stereo to picture-in-picture (PiP) and multi-angle shots of sports events.
This could pave the way for new ways to watch movies and broadcasts, e.g. several cameras from F1 races simultaneously.
What’s next?
According to the slide from the presentation:
all tools in version AVM-11.0 have already been tested for the hardware complexity of the decoder,
verification tests for AV2 are ongoing,
work is underway on reducing encoder/decoder complexity and on 12-bit and higher profiles.
The royalty-free specification is expected to be ready by the end of 2025, but hardware support in televisions and players will not appear for several years.
AV2 in Brief
Features | Values / Data |
|---|---|
Efficiency vs AV1 | +30% (−28.6% PSNR, −32.6% VMAF) |
Supported Formats | 4K, 8K, 3D, multi-stream |
Bit Depth | up to 12-bit (extension) |
Planned Release | end of 2025 |
Organization | Alliance for Open Media (Netflix, Apple, Google, Meta, Tencent, etc.) |
Licenses | completely royalty-free |
Future Extensions | AI/ML, complexity reduction, visual optimizations |
AV2 is an evolution, not a revolution — but one that can realistically reduce streaming costs and improve the quality of images in 4K and 8K movies.
If everything goes according to plan, we will see the first implementations around 2026–2027 in televisions and streaming platforms.
