YouTube plans to begin streaming AV2 on the web as early as 2027, YouTube Engineering Director Des Keane said in an Alliance for Open Media update published October 22, 2026. The statement sets a future target for web streaming.
What AV2’s 30% efficiency claim means
AV2 is a video codec, software that encodes and decodes video. The Alliance for Open Media says AV2 offers about 30% greater compression efficiency than AV1. That figure compares the codecs; the data used by an individual stream depends on the video and its encoding.
Keane also said that, as of March 19, 2026, more than 90% of YouTube’s catalog, weighted by watch time, was available in AV1. That gives the planned AV2 rollout an existing codec baseline, rather than measuring how much data future AV2 streams will use.
What Google demonstrated in Chrome
Google demonstrated AV2 playback in Chrome. TechPowerUp’s October 24, 2026 report described a CES 2026 demonstration on a gaming laptop, using a custom Chrome build and a reference decoder to play 1080p video at 24 frames per second. It was a demonstration setup, not a public Chrome release.
What October 2026 reports said about device hardware
In its October 24, 2026 report, TechPowerUp identified no consumer GPU or television with AV2 hardware decoding. A software decoder or decoder design is distinct from decoding hardware built into a consumer device.
Some online commenters have raised concerns that software decoding could increase processor workload, power use, or heat on devices without AV2 hardware decoding.
