A lot more technical information over at Netflix's blog [0].<p>I'm unsure what to think about VP9 gaining some decent ground. Firstly, it's great that effort is going into more effecient video streaming, considering how difficult to compress and encode quality video can be. However, the chosen standard doesn't seem to be the best on offer.<p>Just sort of Google randomly choosing one [1], and Netflix hedging their bets that others will adopt if they do, so the codec continues to get improved, and they aren't left hanging with the bill if everyone else ignores it.<p>[0] <a href="http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/12/more-efficient-mobile-encodes-for.html" rel="nofollow">http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/12/more-efficient-mobile-en...</a><p>[1] Not quite, Google developed VP9 themselves.
Why not H.265? Other benchmarks suggest a comparable or even higher benefit moving from H.264 Main to H.265 Main, and hardware support for decoding is already present in many phones.
Can somebody elaborate on how many Android devices support VP9 with hardware decoding (wrt to AVC Main support)? The article is shallow on this, but I think it's an important point, because it affects how much battery is being consumed on the client side, and thus user satisfaction with the service.
Note to observers/moderators, title of article:
"How Netflix Keeps Downloads From Eating Up All Your Phone Storage"<p>Title-page of site:
"Netflix Starts Using VP9 Codec, Saving Up to 36% of Bandwidth"<p>Site-title seems more descriptive/of interest to HN.