Adopting AV1 for Real-Time Communication (RTC) at Scale
Meta has deployed the AV1 codec for real-time video calls on the majority of mobile devices in Messenger and WhatsApp.
“In offline tests, we observed at least a 20% bitrate reduction with AV1 compared with H.264/AVC under our product settings on low-end and mid-range devices.”
Meta detailed its multi-year effort to adopt the AV1 video codec for real-time communication, now enabled on most mobile devices in Messenger and WhatsApp, achieving at least 20% bitrate reduction versus H.264 while improving quality on constrained networks. While a substantive engineering achievement, it is a video-codec infrastructure story rather than a core AI industry signal.