Color me the skeptic here, but which benchmark(s) are we talking about? Even h264 vs h265 is not a settled matter - if we truly consider every possible metric, including e.g. SW encoding.
Edit: resolution on that graph image is terrible but they've been sharing it for a while in slide decks so you can probably find better quality by following links from here:
SVT-AV1 has still a lot of visual quality issues. PSNR, SSIM, VMAF are useful metrics, but optimising for these won't get you the best encoder.
x264 didn't get its reputation for going after PSNR and SSIM.
The subjective results in testing follow a similar pattern though. Even with variations between the metrics and subjective scores there's not really enough wiggle room for it to bridgevthe gap:
They had some psy optimisations that introduced "false" "detail" that the eye liked but metrics didn't.
Kind of like what AV1 does with film grain or various audio codecs do with filler audio that's roughly the right "texture" even if not accurate to the original signal.
edit: this is on top of the basics all working fast and well. You could argue that many competitors "overfit" to metrics and they had the wisdom or correct organisational incentives to avoid this.
I'm interested as to why it isn't a settled manner. In my experience, H265 files tend to strike really nice compression ratios (in the same vein, after an AV1 transcode, I'm typically left gobsmacked).
(Or were you talking more about latency? In that case I have to defer to someone with more knowledge.)
h265 has about 20% lower bitrate than h264 at a very similar perceptible quality, but encoding several variants (adaptive streaming) quickly becomes more taxing on the hardware, and support for decoding h264 in hardware is both more ubiquitous and less expensive. As a concrete example, the 2018 generation of Amazon Fire TV sticks supports h265 but gets really hot, so when an adaptive stream offers both h264 and h265, the Fire TV picks the former. We were experimenting with detecting Fire TV serverside to give it a h265-only HLS manifest (the cost savings on the CDN would be sweet), but ultimately decided against it - the device manufacturer probably had a legitimate reason, be it stability or longevity.
I don't quite understand the industry push for AV1. I appreciate that it's patent-unencumbered, but it makes very little sense from business perspective, as you still need to support h264 and/or h265 for devices that can't decode av1 in hardware (and let's agree that forcing software decoding for video should be criminal). So you add a third codec variant (across several quality tiers) to your stack, cost per minute (encode, storage) goes up, engineering/QA effort goes up... Where's the value? Hence my original question, is AV1 really that much better to justify all that?
Adopting AV1 isn't urgent but it's a good long-term move. The sooner we implement hardware support in new chipets, the sooner it will become as ubiquitous as H.264 is today.
As for the business perspective, major streaming services pay major dollars for transferring data. You could probably pay for every part of the AV1 project multiple times over on the money saved by a moderately lowering of Netflix's outbound data.
https://d1qg7561fu8ubi.cloudfront.net/blog/BD-rate_fiugure5....
Lower and to the left is "better"
Edit: resolution on that graph image is terrible but they've been sharing it for a while in slide decks so you can probably find better quality by following links from here:
https://networkbuilders.intel.com/blog/svt-av1-enables-highl...