VP9 is Google's open, royalty-free video codec, released in 2013 as a direct alternative to HEVC. Built on technology Google acquired from On2 Technologies for $134 million, it delivers compression efficiency roughly comparable to HEVC but without any licensing fees. That's why it became YouTube's primary codec in the mid-2010s: a service that streams billions of hours per month wasn't going to pay HEVC royalties on every single one.
For Google, VP9 also served a strategic purpose — it was the bargaining chip that helped corner the patent-pool industry into more open terms, and it directly seeded AV1 (Google co-founded the Alliance for Open Media in 2015). VP9 hardware decode shipped on Android phones, Chromebooks, modern smart TVs and game consoles. Safari finally added VP9 support in 2020 (iOS 14, macOS Big Sur), bringing it to essentially every consumer device.
In 2026, VP9 is in slow strategic retirement. YouTube, Netflix and Google still use it heavily — VP9 transcodes are cheap and ubiquitous — but new investment is going into AV1, which compresses about 20–30 % better. For a streaming product today, VP9 makes sense as a middle-tier rendition in an HLS/DASH ladder for browsers that don't yet decode AV1 in hardware. It's an unfussy, royalty-free workhorse that solved the same problem AV1 now solves better.
