OPEN MEDIA: After years of development, an industry consortium has published the first major release of AV2. The next-generation video encoding standard has ambitious goals, including improved compression efficiency and broader industry adoption, while remaining royalty-free.
The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) recently released version 1.0.0 of the AV2 specification and reference code. The finalized AV2 specification provides a baseline framework for software and hardware developers, who can now begin integrating the new video codec into products across the media and technology industries.
AOMedia introduced AV2 as a next-generation video coding standard built on the same foundations as AV1. Both codecs are royalty-free, open-source solutions for streaming, transcoding, and other media-related workloads, offering an attractive alternative to royalty-bearing formats such as AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, and the newer Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard.
The final AV1 specification was released in 2018, while AV2 took longer than initially anticipated to reach completion. AV1 has since gained significant traction across the industry, with Netflix and other major players adopting the royalty-free codec at an accelerating pace. AV2 was originally expected to arrive in 2025 and promises substantial improvements over its predecessor in image quality, feature support, and compression efficiency.
