Netflix (and Youtube? I forget) will push an AV1 stream if you have the support. This was even mentioned in Apple's show yesterday. So the egg is already there and the chicken is slowly coming, thankfully.
YouTube was the first to support it. They even went to war with Roku over it and Roku killed the YouTube TV app in retaliation to YouTube's mandate that all next-gen devices support AV1, so YouTube went ahead and embedded it inside the regular YouTube app.
Roku's latest devices to support AV1, so I guess either the price came down, they struck a deal, or Roku just lost to the market pressure after Netflix pushed for AV1 as well.
I think a lot of content creators really want AV1 because of the drastic reduction of file sizes. Streaming companies want it to catch on because of the drastic reduction in bandwidth use.
I thought Google was the main one behind AV1. Couldn’t they use their position as one of the world’s biggest video platforms to break that chicken egg loop?
They have. They literally threatened to pull their support from devices if they don't implement the codec in hardware. Roku's spat with Google was a big-ish story when that happened.
I don't know how that can be viewed as a good thing.