Install base. JPEG has already been promoted and is everywhere. If it's not a pain to better use what's already out there, why would one want to support another format (with all its code bloat, security, and legal implications) indefinitely?
Nope, they pushed the expected release date to end of this year[1]. I was really hoping it would come out this month too, then I realized we won't see much adoption till 2019. 2018 will be spent with a couple releases of software decoders, and some adoption, and 2019 is when the hardware decoders will released. Which is when we can expect everyone to more to AV1.
But I'm still skeptical because HEVC might be more widespread with hardware decoders everywhere and people might just not care enough to move to the new standard. Unless MPEG-LA exploits its dominance really bad with license fees, then we can expect MPEG codecs to die off. Although I think x264 will still live.
I would've preferred it if AV1 was 2x better than HEVC, but I don't think even HEVC was 2x better than h.264. So if they can achieve at least 50% in all tests against HEVC, it may be a good enough improvement to the point where companies like Netflix, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter adopt it, as well as tv show and movie torrent uploads (which has its own impact on codec adoption). Plus, YouTube is a given, and it's nice to hear that even Apple may adopt it and that Apple is actually going back on promoting HEVC support.
I actually prefer x264 encoded video even though it results in much larger file sizes. Although HEVC has lower bitrate for supposedly same quality, my needs aren't constrained enough where I have to go for HEVC.
I hope AV1 doesn't lower the quality aspect since it is focused on being a primarily streaming codec with most of the companies being streaming focused (Google, Netflix, Amazon and Vidyo) and them focusing on better compression rate.
If I recall correctly HEVC was also meant to be a streaming codec and I feel like that lead to the lower quality compared to h264. It just doesn't feel that sharp although it is supposed to be 1080p. The blurring aspect is especially bad.
I don't think AOMedia guys will blow it though. I feel like they have a lot more expertise since there are people from multiple codecs (VP9, Daala, etc.) contributing to this.
And slowness of cross-browser deployment. Both for stupid and very valid reasons.
As an example of the latter:
I think Opera Mini (which I ran the development of for its first decade) still has somewhere around 150-200 million monthly unique users, down from a peak of 250M. Pretty much all of those users would be quite happy to receive this image quality improvement for free, I think. (Assuming the incremental encoding CPU cost isn't prohibitive for the server farms.) Opera Mini was a "launch user" of webp (smartphone clients only) for this particular reason.
Many of those users devices are Nokia/Sony Ericsson/etc J2ME devices with no realistic way of ever getting system-level software updates. They are still running some circa 2004 libjpeg version to actually decode the images. It's still safe because the transcoding step in Opera Mini means that they aren't exposed to modern bitstream-level JPEG exploits from current web, but it underscores why any improvements targetting formats like JPEG is still quite useful.
Opera Mini for J2ME actually includes a very tiny (like 10k iirc) Java-based JPEG decoder since quite a few devices back then didn't support JPEG decoding inside the J2ME environment. It's better than having to use PNG for everything, but because it's typically like 5x-10x slower than the native/C version even in a great JVM of the time it really only makes sense to use as a fallback.)
