Netflix Android App Now Streaming AV1 to Save Your Cellular Data

For users of the Netflix Android app, the latter now is streaming the AV1 codec which will help save cellular data. For Canadians with limited data plans, this will come as good news.

Liwei Guo, Vivian Li, Julie Beckley, Venkatesh Selvaraj, and Jeff Watts from Netflix explain the specifics below, saying:

Today we are excited to announce that Netflix has started streaming AV1 to our Android mobile app. AV1 is a high performance, royalty-free video codec that provides 20% improved compression efficiency over our VP9 encodes. AV1 is made possible by the wide-ranging industry commitment of expertise and intellectual property within the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), of which Netflix is a founding member.

Netflix says this may soon reach other platforms beyond Android, saying, “While our goal is to roll out AV1 on all of our platforms, we see a good fit for AV1’s compression efficiency in the mobile space where cellular networks can be unreliable, and our members have limited data plans.”

Users of the Netflix Android app enable the benefits of AV1 by turning on the “Save Data” setting within the app to lower their cellular data usage.



“Our AV1 support on Android leverages the open-source dav1d decoder built by the VideoLAN, VLC, and FFmpeg communities and sponsored by the Alliance for Open Media,” explains Netflix, adding dav1d has been optimized for the company’s content in 10-bit colour.

Netflix says it wants to make AV1 “widely available”, so it will be backing an open-source campaign to “optimize 10-bit performance further and make these gains available to all.”

The company says it is now “also working with device and chipset partners to extend this into hardware.”

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