Wonder if this will speed up the implementation of AV1
dumb to not pay the licences and think you can fight the courts. whatever. switch to av1 and old devices get h264, it’s all fine and the use of heavily patent encumbered formats dies a little more
Agreed, however there’s a lot of small streaming sticks and smart TVs that aren’t going to support AV1 playback, and they’re arguably the most popular/common way people watch Netflix. H.264 uses quite a bit more bandwidth at the scale of Netflix, and they might be better off paying the HEVC license fees for a couple of years until AV1 hardware support is a bit more ubiquitous.
I think you’re right. I’ve been disappointed with how slowly hardware has been gaining AV1 support. Only this year’s Apple silicon supports it. The most current Apple TV does not. The current Nvidia Shield does not. I don’t think any smart TVs support it. Most Android phones do not. Chromecast 4K does not. I don’t remember HEVC support taking this long to proliferate.
Apparently Samsung and LG have started supporting it on their new smart TVs. Although, replacing perfectly good, older TVs just for a new codec seems a bit wasteful, so getting AV1 support in Chromecasts, fire sticks, and Rokus will probably make more of a difference in the short term.
Dear customers, we lost HEVC so now we’re poor, anyways here’s a $7.99 ($18.99 if you want 4K) price increase on your plan effective tomorrow. Also we have removed all your favorite shows and movies, but a new season of Too Hot To Handle is coming soon! Oh and now it’s only one profile, so if your kid wants to watch TV, it will be an extra $23.99 per profile (for HD, $57.99 for 4K). We also decided to implement ads in certain shows. Thanks for being a faithful customer since when we only had DVDs in the mail.
That looks real, did they just send that email?
