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Netflix for Android now streams some shows in AV1 to save data
Netflix for Android now support the royalty-free AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) codec for select shows which will help users save mobile data.
The Alliance for Open Media came out with the royalty-free AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) codec all the way back in 2017 in a bid to replace H.264 as the primary codec for online streaming and media consumption. The new codec offered around 30% better compression than Google's previous VP9 standard without hampering the picture quality. The codec made its way over to Google Chrome with the Chrome 70 update back in October 2018, when Google added an AV1 decoder to the browser with MP4 being used as the supported container (ISO-BMFF). Early last year, following the first rollout of Android 10 beta 1, we learned that Google had added support for the AV1 codec on the platform. Soon thereafter, popular video streaming platform Vimeo added support for the royalty-free AV1 codec and now Netflix seems to be following in its footsteps.