And out them, only Apple, and Qcom are hardware makers, and both have dropped the ball on AV1.
Qcom removed AV1 from latest snapdragon, and Apple haven't put it into M1 despite being one of first in the AV1 crowd.
The momentum is lost, and thus is the war. H265 is already a new de-facto standard by the virtue of it getting first to the hardware, while AV1 crowd was apparently arguing over whose logo design would AV1 bear, and exact legalese wording.
From what I can tell, they haven't had AV1 support in any chip yet. They said it didn't make the cut this time which probably means they just haven't finished and verified yet. Likewise, I'd guess Apples engineering efforts are more focused on upcoming, larger designs so they can finish moving off x86. Once those ship, they can refocus (plus it's another reason to upgrade your machine).
Rollout for most codecs is slow. I remember people saying no vp8/9 hardware decoders was deliberate too.
In truth, streaming companies want to save billions in data and licensing costs. Modern mobile SoCs can decode in software reasonably well, but with worse battery life. Netflix isn't paying for that, so they aren't incentivized to care past the most atrocious battery hogging behavior (it's not like you'll be streaming their exclusives from elsewhere). This leaves Qualcomm to implement it or get worse performance reviews.
They dont, the cost of transferring those bit are minimal. They are much more likely to be in the very low end of millions.
Internet Content Distribution Licensing are Zero from all known HEVC licenses.
Implantation of hardware codec takes time especially for VP8/9 and AV1 which tends to have changes after their so called finalised version 1. Not something I remember happening with H.26x
There are specific power budget requirement for hardware decoding in Mobile SoC. Unlike Desktop / Laptop GPU and iGPU where you can afford to have 2W to decode a video.
Especially considering AV1 is free, more efficient than x265, and pushed forward by powerful actors.
There’s so much engineering knowledge that has to be built up behind how to make these things fast in hardware since the overlap with other mpeg codes is smaller. There’s also a market timing issue. AV1 will be more battery intensive so the consumer demand for AV1 has to make sense (right now the content ecosystem isn’t there). That means Google and Netflix have to transcode their entire libraries. That doesn’t happen often and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some investigation into how to do that more cheaply as the current encoders are unusably slow at the moment (ie they may need to put video encoder hardware in their clouds which I don’t think I’ve heard of these companies ever doing, making the undertaking even more expensive)
The reason H265 has momentum now is because it's been around for longer. AV1 already has a higher efficiency than H265.
The standard that is competing with AV1 is VVC or H.266. As it stands, AV1 has much more momentum than H.266.
That's what everyone said about Chrome and H.264, too. As it stands, Chrome has supported H.264 for over a decade.
Happily, Google's ability to simply declare new standards only goes so far.
Except they weren't. They just paid more money to be considered a "founding" members - assuming that's where you got the idea.
You seem to muse as though AV1 were on the same development track as H265 but delayed. This also doesn't reflect reality. It started well after and had a relatively quick turnaround (as far as codec development goes).
I guess rest of us, honest patent-abiding citizen and low profit buziness have to wait until the middle of 2030s to use H.265 safely.
Dropped the ball implies that they made a mistake. Are you sure it wasn't premeditated?
My point was that "drop the ball" means that they made a mistake. I don't think they did, it was intentional and I'd say even malicious.
Why do you think that this was not the case?