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.

AOMedia's AV2 release arrives amid intensifying competition from the VVC ecosystem, which has been building momentum through patent pool consolidation and hardware support. In July 2025, Access Advance launched its Video Distribution Patent Pool covering HEVC, VVC, VP9, and AV1 codecs with inaugural licensees including ByteDance, Tencent, and NTT Docomo, offering a fixed tiered pricing structure designed to scale with business size. This consolidation directly affects AV2's competitive positioning, since one of AOMedia's core value propositions is the elimination of patent royalty uncertainty that has historically slowed adoption of MPEG-standard codecs.

The hardware decode question remains central to AV2's adoption timeline. AOMedia's own data shows 53% of members planning implementation within 12 months, but the critical path runs through silicon vendors. For AV2, the alliance will need commitments from Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Apple's silicon teams to avoid the multi-year gap between software availability and hardware decode that slowed AV1's mobile penetration. The VDP Pool's inclusion of AV1 alongside VVC and HEVC signals that even patent administrators now treat AV1 as a mainstream codec requiring licensing infrastructure, which may accelerate the same treatment for AV2 once it ships.

On the encoding tooling side, V-Nova has been positioning MPEG-5 LCEVC as a complementary enhancement layer that can improve efficiency of existing base codecs. In August 2025, V-Nova announced two licensing programs for MPEG-5 LCEVC, one for video distribution services based on service size and another for device manufacturers based on volume, with open-access discounts when LCEVC is enabled for all codecs on a device. At NAB Show 2026, V-Nova demonstrated DTV+ deployment in Brazil with more than 50 ecosystem partners including Harmonic, Realtek, FFmpeg, GStreamer, dash.js, and Shaka Player, showing UHD HDR delivery below 10 Mbps. If LCEVC can deliver VVC-level gains when layered on top of AV1 or HEVC, some operators may opt for that incremental path rather than re-encoding entire libraries to AV2.