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The best marketing for AV1 is the horrible mess of HEVC licensing (and the way higher price). It's hard to lower your price when you are free but when your paid alternative increases its price (actually paid price plus the risk) it is even better for you :).

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Although not an expert in video processing, I am somewhat surprised that it has taken until AV1 for the conversation on moving "past" H.264 and H.265 to really get started. Sure, VP8 was not great on a technical level, but my own experience was that it was on par with H.264 which arguably is still the industry standard. With VP9 there was no question that it was superior to anything with a proprietary licensing structure. AV1 of course improves upon this (greatly at that), but both VP8 and VP9 have had hardware decode and encode support for at least half a decade at this point and I am not sure why we did not already start having these kinds of discussions a few years ago once VP9 had proven to be solid and received hardware support (Google have served VP9 on YouTube for at least a few years).

> both VP8 and VP9 have had hardware decode and encode support for at least half a decade at this point

It's only recently that either VP9 or AV1 could be efficiently decoded on iPhones (or Macs). YouTube can afford to serve lower quality experiences to these devices, but many services can't.

Thank you, that is probably what I was missing as I do not frequently deal with the Apple ecosystem.

On the note of YouTube, my understanding is that they gracefully fall back on H.264 if you lack support for VP9 on your hardware (they probably are or will do the same for AV1). Google is most likely promoting VP9 this way for their own long-term benefit.

HLS has also been an issue as the RFC mandates proprietary codecs, but Apple have silently added VP9 support recently in their implementation [1]. The HLS container formats are still proprietary though from what I can understand. MPEG-DASH should support VP9 and AV1, but I have not read up on it much as MPEG-DASH is proprietary as a protocol [2].

[1]: https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/issues/5684

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_ove...

Apple traditionally drags it's feet, when it comes to open codecs. If you want to help adoption of such format, you must be willing to go forward without Apple support, even at the price of eventually providing Apple users with a slightly worse service - that's about the only way to make Apple care (if you have the impact); otherwise you could be finding yourself to wait forever, while Apple ignores the issue.

The AV1 support in M3 is a result of such a threat of being left behind (and thus only decoding); In comparison, Opus is still being ignored, outside of mandatory support in browser.

The threat of VP8 (and before that Theora) was enough to stop H.264 having its price increased at the point where they had conveniently planned an opportunity for them to one-sidedly renegotiate their prices after they had control of the market.

> H.264 answers Google's open codec with forever free license (from 2010)

https://www.theregister.com/2010/08/26/mpegla_v_google/

H.265 never really took off on the web for the same reasons.

So yes, it's taken a while, but most web usage is jumping from the H.264 that couldn't strangle web video due to VP8 to AV1, so it's overall a very clear win. Part of the delay was the patents side dangling a royalty free subset of AVC and HEVC at various points that never materialised.

Which should have been predictable as this is very much a "scorpion and the frog" situation. Codec makers are not permanantly binding themselves to reasonable deals in perpetuity (well excluding the "open"/royalty free ones that do exactly that) because milking rent from a locked-in market is the end-game. They know it and we know it.

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