Codec decisions used to be an engineering sport. Today, they are capital allocation decisions with legal risk attached. For most of the H.264 era, codec choices were technical and reversible: you ran some tests, watched the BD‑rate curves, and rolled out what looked best on your ladder. If it disappointed, you could back it out with little more than engineering …

As a technologist and part-time couch potato, I appreciate Netflix on many levels. During the evening hours, it’s the creativity and breathtaking beauty of its productions. During working hours, it’s their technical contributions, like per-title encoding and VMAF, and their development and promotion of AV1. Unlike other publishers (cough, cough, Amazon), Netflix has always been amazingly gracious in sharing the …

The acquisition of Via Licensing Alliance’s HEVC and VVC programs by Access Advance is being framed as a cleanup of codec licensing. Instead of dealing with two pool administrators, licensees now deal with one, reducing administrative friction and simplifying negotiations. That’s a real improvement, particularly for device manufacturers, and it may reduce effective royalties at the margin. What it doesn’t …

I recently hosted a Streaming Media Connect panel titled “Benefits and Trade-Offs of Adopting and Implementing Codecs.” The contributors were Hassene Tmar from Meta, Behnam Kakavand from Evolution Gaming, and analyst Alex Davies from Rethink TV. The most striking information was not about future codecs. It was about what AV1 deployment looks like when real companies actually do it. You …

Deep Render entered 2024 with real technical progress on its AI-based codec. The team had a working model, encoding and decoding live in FFmpeg and VLC, published research, funding, and a belief that AI-based compression represented a step change rather than an academic experiment. What they lacked was sustained visibility with streaming professionals who make codec decisions. The gap was …

When I published When Metrics Mislead: Evaluating AI-Based Video Codecs Beyond VMAF earlier this year, the takeaway was blunt: traditional video quality metrics like PSNR, MS-SSIM, and VMAF simply can’t be trusted for AI-based codecs. My tests with Deep Render, and supporting research from JPEG AI and Microsoft’s MLCVQA project, showed that those metrics consistently underrate the perceived quality of …

InterDigital’s acquisition of Deep Render marks one of the first instances where a traditional codec IP powerhouse has invested in AI-native compression. Deep Render was built from a clean slate, with an architecture that doesn’t trace its roots to the block-based model that has defined every standard codec for the last 30 years. At some point, that old architecture will …

Three recent Alliance for Open Media presentations on YouTube shed new light on AV2’s performance and utility. Andrew Norkin, Director of Codec Development at Netflix, presented the current status and architecture of AV2. He outlined the codec’s design goals, early performance results, and hardware-focused development approach, noting that the low-level toolset is now finalized. The YouTube video is here. Ryan …

I recently visited Florida Atlantic University’s Multimedia Lab to record the first real-time demonstration of Feature Coding for Machines (FCM), a new approach to video compression designed for AI and edge-based applications. The system, developed by OP Solutions in collaboration with FAU, demonstrates low-power, efficient operation. You can watch a video of the demonstration and its implications here, and it’s …

I recently interviewed Dominic Sunnebo, Commercial Director at Worldpanel by Numerator, for Streaming Media. We discussed new data from the Q2 2025 Entertainment on Demand report. Topics covered include: Sports driving nearly 1 in 4 new streaming subscriptions Why sports are a rented audience—loyal to teams, not platforms The rapid rise of women’s sports and its impact on rights deals …