AOMedia to release AV2 codec by year-end, targeting VVC parity

The release of AV2 marks a strategic escalation in the battle between open-source royalty-free models and licensed MPEG standards. By targeting VVC-level efficiency, AOMedia aims to prevent a repeat of AV1's slow mobile adoption, which was hampered by a lack of hardware-level decoding in early smartphone generations. If the alliance meets its adoption targets, AV2 could significantly lower the cost of delivery for bandwidth-intensive 8K and spatial video applications. For the industry, this signals a shift toward a software-first tech stack that challenges the historical dominance of HEVC. Watch for the mid-2026 release of the first mobile SoCs featuring dedicated AV2 hardware decoders to validate these adoption claims.

The launch of AV2 arrives as the industry grapples with the 'royalty-free' status of its predecessor. Per Sisvel in July 2025, its AV1 patent pool has licensed approximately 50% of the world's AV1-enabled products, indicating that despite AOMedia's royalty-free mandate, significant patent holders outside the alliance are successfully extracting fees. This friction was highlighted further in March 2026 when Dolby Labs filed a lawsuit against Snap Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, alleging that AV1 infringes on its patented technologies. These developments suggest AV2 will face similar legal scrutiny from entities like Access Advance, which consolidated its control over the licensing landscape by acquiring Via Licensing Alliance's HEVC and VVC programs in late 2025.

While AV2 aims for parity with VVC, the latter has gained measurable ground in hardware integration. Per PRLog in February 2025, Intel successfully integrated VVC hardware decoding into its Lunar Lake GPUs, providing a critical base for PC-based playback. However, general streaming adoption remains fragmented; Bitmovin’s 8th Annual Video Developer Report found AV1 utilization at only 13% for the 2024-2025 period, citing a lack of 'killer apps' to justify the high computational cost of moving away from HEVC. AOMedia’s focus on AR/VR in AV2 appears to be a direct attempt to provide that missing use case, positioning the codec as essential for the next wave of wearable spatial computing devices.