AV1 is an open, royalty-free video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media (Google, Netflix, Amazon, and others) to escape HEVC's licensing tangle. It is more efficient than HEVC - meaningfully lower bitrate for the same quality - which appeals directly to large streamers whose biggest cost is egress.
The trade-offs are encoding complexity (AV1 is computationally heavy to encode) and still-maturing hardware decode support, though newer phones, TVs, and chipsets increasingly include it. Platforms typically deploy AV1 first to high-traffic content and capable devices, where the bandwidth savings repay the encoding cost fastest.
