YouTube lên lịch phát video định dạng AV2 từ đầu năm 2027

The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) shared an update on AV2 this week, and the clearest date in it comes from YouTube. Des Keane, Engineering Director at YouTube, confirmed the platform will begin streaming in AV2, which is the royalty-free successor to AV1 that AOMedia says offers roughly 30% better compression. In practice, that means either sharper video at the same bitrate or the same quality using less bandwidth, and the codec also adds support for multi-stream and multi-view video, higher frame rates, and improved HDR. Keane put it plainly: "YouTube AV2 streams will be available for Web as soon as early 2027."

Chrome is the other half. Jim Bankoski, VP of Engineering for Google Chrome, said AV2 playback has been demonstrated in the browser, though Google hasn't said which Chrome version will get it or whether it will be on by default. That demo dates back to CES 2026 , where Google streamed AV2 videos from YouTube to a gaming laptop at 1080p and 24 FPS using a custom Chrome build with the reference decoder. Netflix and Prime Video are also exploring the format, but neither has shared a timeline. Meta wants to repeat its AV1 rollout with AV2, and Intel is working on SVT-AV2.

In terms of hardware, it looks like no consumer GPU or TV supports AV2 hardware decoding yet, so early playback will probably lean on the CPU. According to Videocardz , VideoLAN's dav2d decoder should help there, although VideoLAN says AV2 decoding is roughly five times more complex than AV1. Over 90% of YouTube's catalog, weighted by watch time, was already available in AV1 as of March 2026, so it's reasonable to expect AV2 to take a similar path, starting in software on the web and moving to dedicated silicon later.