AV2 is the upcoming next-generation codec from the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) — the successor to AV1, built by the same consortium of Google, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Mozilla, Intel, AMD and NVIDIA. The draft specification was released in February 2026 after five years of development, and like AV1 it will be royalty-free. Hardware implementations are expected through 2026 and into 2027.
The headline number: AV2 targets roughly 30 % bitrate reduction over AV1 at the same quality for general content, with some benchmarks showing up to 40 % savings on specific material. That continues the historical pattern of each codec generation delivering ~30 % savings over the previous one — H.264 → HEVC saved ~50 %, HEVC → AV1 saved ~30 %, AV1 → AV2 saves another ~30 %. Cumulatively, AV2 encoders deliver the same quality as H.264 at roughly one-quarter the bitrate.
Technically, AV2 builds on AV1's framework with more flexible block partitioning (luma and chroma can split differently), expanded intra-prediction modes, improvements to film grain synthesis, better lossless coding, and native support for 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 chroma in addition to 4:2:0. For a product team in 2026, AV2 is a forward-looking decision — it's too early to deploy as a primary codec because hardware decode is rare, but worth watching closely. Realistic adoption window: pilot encoding in 2026–2027, mainstream deployment 2028+ as devices ship with hardware AV2 decode and the encoders mature past the current libavm reference implementation.
