Encoding

On March 24, 2026, Dolby sued Snap Inc. (Snapchat) for AV1 and HEVC patent infringement in the United States and Brazil. The suits are the first AV1 assertion against a streaming platform by an Access Advance licensor, and Dolby is seeking injunctive relief in both countries. The reason this matters beyond Snap is a single legal fact: Dolby is asserting …

I recently consulted with a company that was running capped CRF-type encoding across four codecs simultaneously: x264, VP9, NVIDIA H.264, and NVIDIA AV1. The first two were VOD encoding, the second two live. I was genuinely impressed by the sophistication and practicality of this video engineering setup, so I asked the client if I could share what they were doing. …

When a codec researcher declares that a newer codec is up to 40% more efficient than the baseline codec, they are making a highly accurate, well-defined claim. However, much like the EPA fuel economy ratings on a new car’s window sticker, these white papers should include a disclaimer stating, “actual bandwidth savings almost certainly will vary.” Given that bandwidth savings …

Before comparing your existing H.264 encodes to HEVC, AV1, or any other advanced codec, you need a baseline you can trust. In practice, many codec efficiency claims collapse once you examine how inefficient the underlying H.264 ladder actually is. This article focuses on fixing that baseline before any codec comparison begins. Let’s take a step back. This is the second …

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 …

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 …

Multiview, or the ability to view multiple live feeds simultaneously, is quickly becoming a must-have feature for sports and live-event streaming. The core technical question for providers is how to implement it.  There are two main architectural options: client-side and server-side multiview. Both can display multiple games or camera angles on a screen, but they work in very different ways, …

I recently sat down with Marc Todd, CEO of Skreens, to discuss how multiview has evolved from a niche feature into a must-have capability for sports and live-event streaming. Skreens has been at the center of this transformation, powering multiview deployments for millions of subscribers. What follows is a slide-by-slide look at Todd’s presentation, told mostly in his own words. …

Traditional and streaming content and service providers, MVPDs, and other rights holders that dismiss multiview as an unnecessary expense are leaving revenue on the table. Wherever it has been deployed, multiview has delighted customers, driven acquisition, and reduced churn. Just as important, it adds new ad inventory and formats, creating monetization opportunities that weren’t possible in a single-screen world. The …

Content and Service Providers, MVPDs, and other rights holders spend billions on sports rights. Without investing in the viewing experience, the return on those investments may shrink fast. For decades, all sports broadcasters —traditional and streaming —competed on a common platform with the same fundamental building blocks: live streaming sports to big-screen TVs, basic client-side application controls, and broadcast copies of …