AV2 Draft Spec Drops, and the Codec Licensing War Starts Early
AOMedia's next-generation codec promises another 30% efficiency gain over AV1 — but patent pool fragmentation and device silicon timelines mean the fight begins long before the first stream.
MOUNTAIN VIEW — The Alliance for Open Media this week published the first working draft of AV2, its successor to the AV1 codec that steadily ate into HEVC’s dominance over the past half-decade. Early benchmark figures circulating among members claim 25–30% bitrate savings over AV1 at equivalent perceptual quality — numbers that, if they hold, would let platforms deliver 4K HDR in bandwidth currently required for 1080p.
But in the codec business, the spec is the easy part.
The Patent Shadow
AV1’s core promise was freedom: a royalty-free codec backed by a patent pool of mutually defensive tech giants. That promise is being stress-tested before AV2 even ships. Two patent assertion entities have already filed letters asserting essential claims against draft AV2 tools — claims AOMedia’s defensive license structure was explicitly designed to blunt.
The parallel history is cautionary. HEVC’s three competing patent pools — MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, and Velos — produced licensing chaos so severe that hardware adoption stalled for years, opening the door AV1 walked through. VVC, technically superior on paper, remains stranded in the same licensing thicket.
Silicon Timeline Is the Real Deadline
Codec adoption lives and dies in chip fabs, not standards bodies:
| Milestone | AV1 (2018 spec) | AV2 (projected) |
|---|---|---|
| First hardware decoders | ~2.5 years post-spec | ~2 years (est.) |
| >50% device coverage | ~5 years | ~4 years (est.) |
| Meaningful stream share | ~6 years | TBD |
Sources at two silicon vendors confirmed AV2 decoder blocks are already in design — a faster start than AV1 managed — but warned that volume smartphone silicon won’t carry hardware decode until late 2027 at the earliest.
“Everyone learned the AV1 lesson: wait for the patent fog to clear before you commit a fab line. The question is whether AV2’s defensive pool survives its first real test.”
— licensing attorney specializing in media codec pools
Ongoing coverage in The Codec War Tracker.