Alright, pull up a chair. We need to talk about AV1. The codec wars are a special kind of hell.

For anyone who’s ever worked in video engineering, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a multi-decade, billion-dollar street fight over bytes and pixels, waged in the esoteric battlegrounds of DCT blocks and entropy coding. We argue endlessly about H.264’s ubiquity, HEVC’s licensing nightmare, and the mythical potential of the “next big thing.”

For years, we’ve been promised a streaming messiah. A codec that would deliver pristine 4K, slay the buffering dragon, and magically shrink our data bills. The industry anointed AV1 as the chosen one, the open-source hero that would free us from the licensing labyrinth of H.265/HEVC.

Most of the time, a new codec offers a modest, almost boring improvement. You get a 15-20% bump in efficiency, you write some blog posts, and life goes on. It’s evolution, not revolution. Netflix, being Netflix, was one of the first to roll it out at scale. But is it actually any good? Or is it just another line item in a press release?

I decided to find out. Armed with a Fire TV, a MacBook, the Android Debug Bridge (ADB), and a level of patience only attainable after debugging a newborn’s requirement at 3 AM, I spent multiple weekends capturing and analyzing every bit Netflix sent my way.

The assumption is simple: AV1, being newer, must be more efficient. And it is. But the real story, the one that matters to engineers and anyone who hates seeing a spinning circle, is far more interesting. It turns out that for some content, AV1 is so obsessed with quality it actually uses more data than its predecessor.

Yes, you read that right. Let’s get into it.

TL;DR - The Numbers Don’t Lie

Before we dive deep, here’s the high-level summary.

• Up to 55% bandwidth savings on blockbuster movies.
• Peak bitrate spikes often cut in half during action scenes (goodbye, buffering).
• 50% more Netflix hours per month on your phone’s data plan.
• Netflix’s wallet: My back-of-the-napkin math puts potential savings around $25M/year.
• The catch: Not all content benefits equally—some animated shows use more data with AV1.

The following table is your cheat sheet to the entire analysis. All metrics are relative to AV1

How I Accidentally Became a Netflix Data Stalker

Look, I wasn’t planning to spend my evenings decoding Netflix streams like some kind of bandwidth detective. But after seeing the 47th “AV1 is the future” post without actual data, I got annoyed enough to do something about it.

The Setup:

• Fire TV Stick (because it actually reports real bitrates)
  • 4K Max model (2024) for receiving AV1 streams
  • 4K model (2021) for receiving H.264 and H.265 streams
• Python script leveraging Android Debug (ADB) Bridge capturing data every 5 seconds
• 5 viewing sessions per title to account for network conditions
• 30-second windows aggregated into min/max/average values
• Zero chill about methodology

Here’s what the debug info looks like on FireTV

The Victims:

• 🍌 Minions (CGI animation) - AV1 vs H.264
• 🎬 Catch Me If You Can (live-action film) - AV1 vs H.264
• 🎩 Peaky Blinders S1E1 (live-action TV) - AV1 vs H.264
• 🧪 Breaking Bad S1E1 (grainy film) - AV1 vs H.265
• 🐴 Bojack Horseman (2D animation) - AV1 vs H.265

Yes, I watched the Breaking Bad pilot ten times for science. My Netflix recommendations are permanently broken.

Part 1: The Foundation - Massive Efficiency Gains

First, let’s establish the baseline. Is AV1 actually more efficient? The data shows it’s not just an incremental improvement; it’s a demolition.

Finding #1: The Headline Savings

AV1 is fighting a war on two fronts: against the old king, H.264, and the modern contender, H.265/HEVC. What I found was a knockout in both fights.

Let’s take Peaky Blinders as an example—a show famous for its cinematic style, complete with smoke and moody lighting. The average bitrate for the AV1 stream was 48.1% lower than H.264.

Let that sink in. This isn’t a minor tweak. This is a nearly 50% gain over the most ubiquitous codec on the planet. This was my first “holy shit” moment.

Finding #2: The Art of Silence

How does AV1 achieve such massive savings? Part of the secret is how ruthless it is during the boring parts. I call this the “efficiency floor”—the typical low-end bitrate a codec settles on during static, quiet scenes. To measure this, I analyzed the average of the minimum bitrates across all segments.

AV1 is absolutely merciless during quiet moments, dropping to bitrates that would make H.264 engineers file bug reports. But it works—every saved bit during dialogue scenes funds the spectacular action sequences.

Finding #3: The Payoff in Gigabytes

Percentages are boring. Here’s what AV1 actually saves you in tangible data:

• 🎬 Catch Me If You Can (141 min): 1.94 GB saved
• 🍌 Minions (91 min): 1.48 GB saved
• 🧪 Breaking Bad S1E1 (58 min): 0.93 GB saved
• 🎩 Peaky Blinders S1E1 (59 min): 0.7 GB saved

For a 10-episode season of Peaky Blinders, that’s 7 GB saved. Enough for three additional HD movies.

“Netflix literally gave you a ‘buy 10 episodes, get 3 movies free’ deal and nobody noticed.”

Part 2: The Secret Weapon - Thriving Under Pressure

Saving data is one thing, but AV1’s real genius lies in how it handles complexity. This is where we uncover the fascinating paradoxes that make AV1 a strategic masterpiece.

Finding #4: The Action Scene Advantage

You’d think a codec saves data by cutting corners during chaotic action scenes. AV1 does the exact opposite. Its efficiency advantage often accelerates when the on-screen complexity ramps up.

We can prove this by segmenting each stream into four “quartiles” of complexity. Q1 represents the quietest 25% of scenes, while Q4 represents the most frantic 25%.

Notice how Peaky Blinders actually gets MORE efficient as scenes get harder? A perfect example of this in action is the CGI-animated film Minions. The chart below shows the H.264 stream (red) spiking wildly during action scenes, while the AV1 stream (green) remains remarkably composed.

When the screen is filled with smoke, rain, and fast action, AV1’s advantage widens. It thrives under pressure.

Finding #5: The Peak Bitrate Anomaly

Peak bitrates are the silent killers of a smooth streaming experience. But in my analysis, the single highest bitrate spike across all five titles didn’t come from an older, less efficient codec. It came from AV1.

The hall of fame (or shame):

• AV1’s Wildest Moment: The AV1 stream for Breaking Bad hit a staggering 22,573 kbps spike.
• HEVC’s Response: For the same scene, the HEVC stream topped out at a more controlled 19,428 kbps.
• The Norm: In contrast, during the most chaotic action scenes in Minions, H.264 peaked at over 10 Mbps, while AV1 stayed calmly under 4 Mbps.

This isn’t a bug. It’s a deliberate, almost fanatical, choice to prioritize visual quality over anything else, which leads us directly to the most interesting discovery of this project.

Finding #6: The Breaking Bad Paradox

So, why would the “more efficient” codec throw a 22 Mbps tantrum? This brings us to the Breaking Bad Paradox. The behavior we see is a direct result of Netflix’s shot-based encoding strategy in action. Their systems analyze the show scene-by-scene and see that its signature 35mm film grain is a crucial, and very data-intensive, part of its artistic identity.

Faced with this, the encoder is given a clear directive: preserve that grain at all costs.

This results in a bizarre Jekyll-and-Hyde mode. Instead of just saving bits everywhere, the encoder acts like a savvy budget manager operating under Netflix’s quality-first philosophy:

• It robs bits from the data-poor scenes (quiet dialogue) by compressing them aggressively.
• It then spends that budget on the data-rich scenes (intense grain), ensuring the show’s look is rendered with absolute fidelity, even if it causes a massive spike.

This reveals that the ultimate strategy isn’t just about the codec’s raw power; it’s about the intelligent instructions guiding it.

Finding #7: The Bojack Horseman Mystery

The Bojack Horseman result, where AV1 uses slightly more data, is the other side of the same coin: Netflix’s obsession with perceptual quality. The shot-based analysis for this show isn’t concerned with film grain, but with preserving the clean lines and solid colors of 2D animation.

Here’s what’s happening: the system recognizes that for this type of content, a tiny extra investment in bitrate can deliver a disproportionately large improvement in visual quality, eliminating subtle artifacts that older codecs might introduce around character outlines.

HEVC can hit “good enough” quality at 1.0 Mbps. But Netflix has directed AV1 to deliver “pristine” quality at 1.1 Mbps—a worthwhile trade-off to ensure the animation looks exactly as the creators intended. It’s the difference between a decent burger and a gourmet one for just a few cents more, a decision made possible by a platform that prioritizes quality over raw efficiency.

Part 3: The User Experience - A Smoother, More Stable Stream

All this technical wizardry is impressive, but what does it actually mean when you hit “play”?

Finding #8: The Buffer Battle Royale

Imagine a 10 Mbps internet connection. Let’s count how many times each stream would cause buffering by exceeding that limit.

In Catch Me If You Can, the H.264 stream crossed into the danger zone 16 times. The AV1 stream? Zero. The chart below makes this crystal clear—watch how the red H.264 line constantly spikes while the green AV1 line stays composed.

AV1 literally eliminated buffering for two titles and significantly reduced it for the others. Your internet didn’t get better—the codec did.

Finding #9: Faster Start-Up, Less Waiting

You click play, and those first 30 seconds determine whether you commit to watching or bounce to TikTok. A high initial bitrate can kill the experience on slower connections, leading to a frustrating wait before the video even starts.

Across the board, AV1 shows a massive advantage right from the very first frame.

Real-world impact: That hotel WiFi that barely loads your email? It might actually handle an AV1 Netflix stream from the get-go. By requiring less data to start, AV1 drastically reduces the initial buffering time, getting you to your show faster.

Finding #10: The “Safe Zone” Revolution

For users on mobile or congested Wi-Fi, the most important metric is the percentage of time a stream stays below a low-bitrate threshold (e.g., 2 Mbps).

AV1 makes HD streaming viable on connections that would have struggled with legacy codecs. Your mobile data plan just became way more useful.

The Bottom Line: What This Actually Means

Let’s bring this all together.

For You, the Viewer

• On Your Phone: A 10GB data plan used to get you ~12 hours of Netflix. With AV1’s efficiency, that’s now closer to 20 hours. You can binge an entire extra season of a show on your commute, for free.
• On Bad Wi-Fi: That hotel or airport Wi-Fi that always buffers? AV1’s lower bitrate floor and superior stability make streaming on it not just possible, but smooth.
• On a Great Connection: You get a higher-quality, more detailed picture, especially in complex scenes, because the codec is using your bandwidth more intelligently.

For Netflix, the Business

Let’s talk money, because that’s what drives these decisions.

• My back-of-the-napkin math, using some conservative industry estimates for bandwidth costs, puts Netflix’s potential savings in the ballpark of $25M/year. That’s money they can invest in shows instead of paying to internet providers.

The Catch (There’s Always a Catch)

I’m not an AV1 evangelist who ignores reality. The codec has two major hurdles:

1. Encoding Cost: AV1 is a beast to encode. This isn’t just a one-time software update; it requires a massive, ongoing investment in server infrastructure for any streaming service.
2. Device Support: Hardware decoding for AV1 isn’t on every device yet. This is a classic chicken-and-egg problem that will take a few more years of device refresh cycles to fully resolve.

The Verdict: A Revolution in Progress

Despite the hurdles, the data is clear. AV1 is not just another spec sheet with theoretical gains. In real-world streams, it delivers on its promise with staggering results.

It’s smarter in quiet moments, more composed during action scenes, and its efficiency advantage often accelerates the harder you push it. The transition will be slow and expensive, but it’s no longer a question of if AV1 will dominate streaming, but when.

We’re witnessing a quiet revolution, one Gigabyte at a time.

Found this useful? Share it with anyone who’s ever cursed their internet connection during a Netflix binge. And yes, I realize I spent a few weekends proving that Netflix’s engineers know what they’re doing. No regrets.