You may have heard that Netflix is soon to support the AVIF image format. But what is it? How does AVIF work? What are AVIF's advantages over other image formats? Let's take a look.
What Is AVIF?
Developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) and launched in February 2019, AV1 Image File Format (AVIF), also known as AV1, is one of the most recently launched image codecs available. AVIF mainly focuses on delivering you optimized, smaller-sized images while keeping the same quality.
Unlike Google's WebP image format, which didn't attract many supporters, AVIF has quickly gained the support of many big companies, including Google, Netflix, and Apple. In fact, Apple now even contributes to the AVIF project directly, as does Netflix.
AVIF’s Highlight Features
- High dynamic range (HDR)
- 8, 10, 12-bit color depth
- Lossless and lossy compression
- Monochrome (alpha/depth) or multi-components
- Any color space including wide color gamut, ISO/IEC CICP, and ICC profiles
- 4:2:0, 4:2:2, 4:4:4 chroma subsampling
- Film grain
AVIF Supported Browsers
- Google Chrome
- Mozilla Firefox
- Windows 10, post version 19H1
Netflix’s Need for AVIF Image Format
If you watch Netflix, you know their homepage is filled with images of movies and TV shows. This slows down the browsing experience of viewers.
To avoid this, Netflix plans to shift to the AVIF image format, which, as you read above, focuses on delivering optimized images in smaller file sizes while keeping the image quality more or less the same.
Netflix says:
We believe the AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) has the potential. Using the framework we have open-sourced, AVIF compression efficiency can be seen at work and compared against a whole range of image codecs that came before it.
Is AVIF the Next Default Image Format?
Looking at its capabilities, it seems that AVIF may even be the world’s default image format in a few years. However, right now, AVIF is still under development.