AOMedia’s SVT-AV1 Wins IBC 2025 Innovation Award in “Content Everywhere” Category

We’re excited to share that AOMedia’s SVT-AV1 was recently named the 2025 IBC Innovation Award winner in the "Content Everywhere" category . SVT-AV1, the flagship project from AOMedia’s Software Implementation Working Group (SIWG) offers a very favorable tradeoff between encoding complexity and bitrate savings that allows users to deploy it in most practical video processing workflows. At the same time, it offers the option to reduce decoding complexity, with negligible drop in bitrate efficiency, allowing video files to play more smoothly on any device – even $90 smartphones that lack AV1 hardware decoders.

Originally started as an open-source project by Intel and Netflix back in 2018, later joined by Tencent and Meta, SVT-AV1 (“SVT” stands for Scalable Video Technology, where the term scalability refers to the computation aspect of video encoding) aspired to become the highest performing open-source video encoder, offering the widest range of compute complexities. In 2020, it became the cornerstone and flagship project of the newly formed Software Implementation Working Group. After a lot of hard work and contributions from AOMedia members Intel, Netflix, Tencent, Meta - and as of late from VLITT - but also from the entire open-source community that embraced the SVT-AV1 project, it first achieved top performance compared to other popular open-source video encoders, including x264, x265 and libvpx, for practical offline (“video-on-demand”) workflows. In fact, SVT-AV1 is the only known SW video encoder to cover three orders of magnitude in compute complexity. As of its latest release, version 3.1, support for low-delay, all-intra (which includes still-image coding in the AVIF format) and real-time communication (RTC) use cases has been constantly improving, as well.

SVT-AV1 has already had a tangible impact. For example, after Meta deployed the fast-decode feature earlier this year, the company saw decoder cycle savings of 25-50%. Additionally, more than 70% of Meta users are now consuming SVT-AV1 video, including those utilizing lower-end Android devices.

Learn more about SVT-AV1 in our recent blog, and via this video:

Established over 20 years ago, the IBC Innovation Awards are held to honor projects that use technology to transform how content is created, managed, and delivered. As Fergal Ringrose, Chair of the Innovation Awards Jury, shared:

"Our 2025 winners show that innovation isn't just about what’s practical – it’s about what's possible, impactful and transformative across content, society and sustainability."

Winners of the Content Everywhere Award are celebrated for the connected experience their project brings to the world – using technology to engage audiences everywhere.

The award was announced at the recent IBC Convention in Amsterdam, where it was received by Hassene Tmar, Technical Program Manager, Meta; Nagesh Puppala, GM, Media and Entertainment Solutions, Intel; and Dr. Pierre-Anthony Lemieux, Executive Director of AOMedia.

Congratulations to AOMedia’s Software Implementation Working Group on this significant recognition.