Architecture guide: Scaling reach while slashing egress costs via AV1

Infrastructure leads face increasing pressure to decouple audience growth from cloud spend. By shifting to AV1-heavy ladders and optimizing protocol latency to match specific product needs—rather than defaulting to the lowest possible latency—platforms can avoid the linear cost scaling that often kills margins. This architecture shift signals a transition where codec efficiency and edge-cached delivery are now primary financial levers for streaming profitability. Watch for shifts in CDN pricing models as providers respond to higher AV1 adoption rates and lower byte-per-viewer ratios.

The emphasis on cost control aligns with broader industry sentiment; per the Bitmovin Video Developer Report 2025/26, cost control has become the top concern for 38% of video professionals, surpassing ad insertion. This focus is driven by a massive expansion in global video traffic, which exceeded 80% of all internet data by 2025, according to MarketIntelo reporting from June 2026. As platforms pivot toward hybrid AVOD/SVOD models to preserve margins, metadata and bandwidth efficiency have moved from engineering abstractions to core C-suite priorities.

AV1 adoption has reached a critical inflection point in mid-2026. Netflix reported that the codec now accounts for roughly 30% of its total streaming hours, with hardware decode support reaching approximately 80% of active consumer devices. While H.264 remains a common fallback for legacy compatibility, greenfield deployments in 2026 are increasingly shifting to AV1 for primary delivery to capture the ~30% bitrate savings over HEVC. Market data from ResearchAndMarkets suggests the live streaming sector alone will grow to $2.58 billion in 2026, forcing a move toward cloud-native stacks that can automate the complex ABR laddering described in the Fora Soft guide.

Simultaneously, the CDN landscape is growing more complex. Per BlazingCDN (November 2025), hyperscaler egress pricing has faced scrutiny as effective rates often include a 15–30% surcharge from request fees and log delivery. This has pushed mid-tier platforms to favor multi-CDN routing and aggressive cache hit ratio (CHR) tuning. Recent industry disclosures show that even minor manifest misconfigurations can inflate origin egress bills by over 30%, making the technical discipline of isolating the control plane from the data plane—a key recommendation in the 2026 guide—essential for operational survival.