Will AV1 overtake HEVC in market adoption?

When you take a look at the most used general purpose video codecs in the world right now, you'll see a trend: although AV1 beats HEVC at compression, yet it still shows up as the underdog of the wolfpack. On paper, H.265/HEVC should be replaced by AV1 as of yesterday but the numbers show otherwise: HEVC is proven to be used more than 3 times compared to AV1. For a codec that offers an average of 30% compression benefit over HEVC video, I was quite intrigued to dig into the complete picture as there must be an explanation for this, right?

Do statistics matter?

NETINT, a semiconductor company who made a report on the state of video encoding in 2026, stated that AV1 is no longer a future codec but rather an infrastructure decision. H.264 keeps the crown as the most used codec with 84% market adoption, but that was to be expected. The winner of the biggest growing codec year over year? That's AV1, growing from 17% market adoption to 56% market adoption at the end of 2026 - that's measured over 286 surveyed professionals in the industry.

And we haven't even mentioned the results of HEVC yet, which is projected to grow from 65% adoption to 85% at the end of 2026. More on that later, first we got some chronological storytelling to do.

AV1 had a rough start

To understand the start of AV1 in the AV market, let's take a look at the following timeline:

1. Early to mid 2018: the AV1 bitstream spec has been released, this includes a software reference encoder/decoder. The reference tooling was accurate, but slow. This meant no adoption yet for general purpose usage.
2. December 2018: VideoLAN and its community released a first version of a faster CPU decoder for AV1 called dav1d. This allowed relatively modern laptops to decode AV1 videos at 1080p, but at full CPU load nevertheless.
3. April 2019: the first open-source release of SVT-AV1 - a faster CPU encoder for AV1 initially published by Intel and Netflix.
4. 2021: GPUs of major vendors added support for hardware accelerated decoding. This only applied to devices starting from RTX 30 series cards, AMD RDNA 2 cards, and 11th gen Intel iGPUs.
5. 2022: Intel added AV1 hardware encoding to its new product line, dedicated Intel Arc GPUs!
6. Late 2022: NVIDIA and AMD catch up with Intel, adding hardware accelerated AV1 encoding support to RTX 40 series and AMD RDNA 3 GPUs.
7. Late 2023: Apple adds an AV1 hardware decoder to the A17 Pro chip, used in the iPhone 15 Pro model line.
8. Late 2023: Qualcomm catches up as well, bringing hardware AV1 decoding to their flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC.
9. 2024: Apple adds AV1 decoding to their M3 Macs and the M4 iPad Pro.
10. 2026: AV1 becomes a real standard for Apple, as their M5 Pro/Max chips also added hardware encoding next to decoding.

So to conclude, it took AV1 around three years to finally get hardware decoding on enthusiast-grade hardware. That's five years until the iPhone, which was and still is one of the most used media consumption devices, started supporting hardware accelerated decoding. While software decoding still is feasible for older iPhone models, this often meant that the devices are getting incredibly hot during video playback, which is a no-go if you ask me. Same goes for laptops: who wants their laptop to sound like a jet plane about to take off, and a battery life of 45 minutes when playing a movie?

Back to the favouritism of HEVC

Straight to the point: HEVC was released 5 years before AV1. The benefit between the predecessor - H.264 - and this new codec was clear: between 25 to 50 percent improvement in file size at the same quality, dependent on what resolution was used. The benefit of AV1 over HEVC is much smaller, with a bigger range in file size improvement depending on what happens in the video itself and the resolution. The rule of thumb here is between 20 and 30 percent, if we combine data from multiple sources.

In the meantime, the iPhone 6s released in 2015 got a hardware HEVC decoder. That's two years after the codec wat ratified and published. And FFmpeg even added the x265 encoder and decoder to the project the same year of the codec release. And so did VLC Media Player. Now the dots are connected: the proprietary codec was way faster with market adoption, even though device manufacturers had to pay royalties in order to add support for the codec.

On top of that, the AV1 codec added minor improvements over H.265 in terms of efficiency at the cost of a way higher need of computational power to decode and encode.

The occasional codec

So what's the final verdict? Now that modern devices all support hardware decoding of AV1, big tech companies like YouTube, Netflix and Twitch can finally rest their case and invest in serving videos with the AV1 codec. Let's be real: it takes a boatload of storage to store the millions of videos on YouTube alone. Before 2024, it was merely a codec to efficiently archive videos for playback later on enthusiast hardware. Now that all your modern devices support efficient AV1 playback, we can safely say that AV1 is going to be the way to go, especially in these trying times where storage cost is through the roof.