It’s not every day a video codec wins an Emmy. But yesterday, the Television Academy honored the AV1 specification with a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award, recognizing its impact on how the world delivers video content.

The web needed a new video codec

Through the mid-2010s, video codecs were an invisible tax on the web, built on a closed licensing system with expensive, unpredictable fees. Most videos online relied on the H.264 codec, which open-source projects like Firefox could only support without paying MPEG LA license fees thanks to Cisco’s open-source OpenH.264 module.

Especially as demand for video grew, the web needed a next-generation codec to make high-quality streaming faster and more reliable. H.265 promised efficiency gains, but there was no guarantee of another OpenH.264-style arrangement. The risk was another fragmented ecosystem where browsers like Firefox couldn’t play large portions of the web’s video.

Enter AV1

To solve this, Mozilla joined other technical leaders to form the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) in 2015 and started ambitious work on a next-generation codec built from Google’s VP9, Mozilla’s Daala, and Cisco’s Thor.

The result was AV1, released in 2018, which delivered top-tier compression as an open standard under a royalty-free patent policy. It’s now widely deployed across the streaming ecosystem, including hardware decoders and optimized software decoders which allow open-source browsers like Firefox to provide state of the art video compression to all users across the web.

AV1 is also the foundation for the image format AVIF, which is deployed across browsers and provides excellent compression for still and animated images (AVIF is based on a video codec, after all).

The Emmy award reflects the value of open standards, open-source software, and the sustained work by AOM participants and the broader community fighting for an open web.

Looking ahead to AV2

AV1 fixed a structural problem in the ecosystem at the time, but the work isn’t finished. Video demand keeps rising, and the next generation of open codecs must remain competitive.

AOMedia is working on the upcoming release of AV2. It will feature meaningfully better compression than AV1, much higher efficiency for screen/graphical content, alpha channel support, and more.

As AV2 arrives, our goal remains unchanged: make video on the web open, efficient, and accessible to everyone.