Saturday, October 24th 2026
YouTube Sets Early 2027 Target for AV2 Streams on the Web
The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) shared an update on AV2 this week, and the clearest date in it comes from YouTube. Des Keane, Engineering Director at YouTube, confirmed the platform will begin streaming in AV2, which is the royalty-free successor to AV1 that AOMedia says offers roughly 30% better compression. In practice, that means either sharper video at the same bitrate or the same quality using less bandwidth, and the codec also adds support for multi-stream and multi-view video, higher frame rates, and improved HDR. Keane put it plainly: "YouTube AV2 streams will be available for Web as soon as early 2027."
Chrome is the other half. Jim Bankoski, VP of Engineering for Google Chrome, said AV2 playback has been demonstrated in the browser, though Google hasn't said which Chrome version will get it or whether it will be on by default. That demo dates back to CES 2026, where Google streamed AV2 videos from YouTube to a gaming laptop at 1080p and 24 FPS using a custom Chrome build with the reference decoder. Netflix and Prime Video are also exploring the format, but neither has shared a timeline. Meta wants to repeat its AV1 rollout with AV2, and Intel is working on SVT-AV2.
In terms of hardware, it looks like no consumer GPU or TV supports AV2 hardware decoding yet, so early playback will probably lean on the CPU. According to Videocardz, VideoLAN's dav2d decoder should help there, although VideoLAN says AV2 decoding is roughly five times more complex than AV1. Over 90% of YouTube's catalog, weighted by watch time, was already available in AV1 as of March 2026, so it's reasonable to expect AV2 to take a similar path, starting in software on the web and moving to dedicated silicon later.
Sources:
Alliance for Open Media, Videocardz
Chrome is the other half. Jim Bankoski, VP of Engineering for Google Chrome, said AV2 playback has been demonstrated in the browser, though Google hasn't said which Chrome version will get it or whether it will be on by default. That demo dates back to CES 2026, where Google streamed AV2 videos from YouTube to a gaming laptop at 1080p and 24 FPS using a custom Chrome build with the reference decoder. Netflix and Prime Video are also exploring the format, but neither has shared a timeline. Meta wants to repeat its AV1 rollout with AV2, and Intel is working on SVT-AV2.
32 Comments on YouTube Sets Early 2027 Target for AV2 Streams on the Web
AV2 should really help conserve bandwidth, my own testing with VVC has yielded visually lossless DVD quality video (480p 24) at essentially mp3 bitrates (400k ish). This was early last year though, encoders probably improved since, and probably will not take several hours to encode a minute with a 14900K-equivalent CPU :fear:
Before AI, programmers had to be highly skilled in mathematics and statistics—and also very creative—to improve something that was already near perfection. Today’s AI can go much further, by way of trial and error.
Yes the CPU did decoding, then handed rendering, compositing etc off to the GPU.
Now:
The CPU is forced to do everything... And simply does not have the oomph to 'do it all', obsoleting older hardware independent of OS.
ie: Linux or Windows; your hardware is now 'too old' to surf.
Specific eg:
Client's old G45 system running Q4OS Trinity and Chromium, which used to surf just fine is struggling and Youtube is 'not happening' anymore.
Proof that the iGPU is still capable of rendering etc:
GTK-Pipeviewer plays Youtube video just fine using CPU decode, but IGP rendering etc as it always used to.
You might ask Jim Bankoski and co about that plz!?
And do not have youtube account.
AV2 targets roughly 25-30% compression efficiency gains over AV1, but the compute complexity required for software decoding will make CPU fallback completely impractical on low-power Android TVs, smart sticks, and mobile hardware.
Google will almost certainly replicate the staged rollout they used with VP9 and AV1: start with 4K/8K desktop browser streams where discrete GPUs and modern desktop CPUs can brute-force or assist the decoding, while continuing to serve AV1 and VP9 to living room and mobile clients until fabless semiconductor vendors bake fixed AV2 ASIC blocks into their 2027-2028 reference designs.
- I have bad news for you.
Hardware rollouts always have massive silicon inertia. For living room devices, streaming sticks, and lean media players, AV1 is going to remain the practical baseline standard through the end of the decade.
Now their saved bandwidth will result in users extra power use.
The dav2d decoder will obviously not be as fast - both because of how early things are and how AV2 is more complex, but by the time AV2 becomes available on most of the youtube library, the 10 year old machines then should be fast enough to handle it entirely in software.
What I actually don't like is how we're going to see et another reduction in bandwidth instead of an increase in image quality, in a world where bandwidth gets cheaper every year on average. And don't even get me started on the audio side of things - audio should be lossless by default in 2026, yet here we are.
Yes, you save few mb here or gb there, on longer streams bandwith-wise, but that "30% better compression" has to be eventually decompressed client side, and that client is most likely running a Ryzen from few years back that has no clue how to handle the new shiny codec.
h264 for all its bandwidth "hungryness" can be natively decoded on freaking GeForce 8600 GT from 2007! Save a few mb/gb on some YouTube stream on Sumerian Nibiru alien goobla-goobla while your CPU/GPU chokes decoding those AV2 "bandwidth savings" or have h264 do it at 0.1% hardware load while you gooble up few extra mb/gb of bandwith... I would always choose latter.
It's all very 21st century "poop flows downstream river, their problem down there" type of engineering. Yeah, we Google and our clients save on bandwidth costs, network side, while millions if not billions of users have their CPUs/GPUs pegged until Intel/Nvidia/whomever decides to add native extensions. Sigh... its all so very....
...
..
.
Nowadays? Well you see how it is! Not only are generational hardware releases spaced much more apart, there is no guarantee AV2 will be baked in...
So yeah, release pace of new encoders and standards were fine when hardware was being released at breakneck pace. Now, AV2 hardware decoding is planned on consumer GPUs/CPUs.... when? early 2030s? LOL.
It might be eternal 2005 in well insulated from reality Silicon Valley, and Avatar: The Last Airbender just aired, but most of the planet is firmly in 2026 and most of that planet is running decade old Intel hardware and GPUs from the Maxwell era...
No, this benefits Google first where they will recoup massive bandwith saving costs for themselves and their clients. You, the average Joe with a GTX 1080 and a Ryzen 3600x? LOL. Whats a few watts extra of power consumption anyway....
Remember that about 2015 the smartphone dethroned the PC as the primary driver of basically all consumer technology innovation.
Reducing bandwidth is a more pressing concern for today's congested cellular data networks. It's not as important for someone on a desktop PC sitting on a fat broadband connection.
Like I said, it's the paradigm of "NOT MY PROBLEM" engineering.
...
..
.