YouTube plans to begin streaming in AV2, the royalty-free successor to AV1, as early as 2027. Des Keane, Engineering Director at YouTube, confirmed the platform will roll out AV2 streams on the web, with AOMedia claiming roughly 30% better compression — meaning sharper video at the same bitrate or the same quality using less bandwidth. AV2 also adds support for multi-stream and multi-view video, higher frame rates, and improved HDR.
Chrome is the other half of the equation. Jim Bankoski, VP of Engineering for Google Chrome, said AV2 playback has been demonstrated in the browser, though Google hasn't specified which Chrome version will support it or whether it will be enabled by default. The 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 AV2, but neither has shared a timeline. Meta aims to repeat its AV1 rollout with AV2, and Intel is working on SVT-AV2. No consumer GPU or TV currently supports AV2 hardware decoding, so early playback will likely rely on the CPU. Over 90% of YouTube's catalog, weighted by watch time, was already available in AV1 as of March 2026.
Source: TechPowerUp News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing