Whether or not they use it is a completely different matter from whether AV1 is useful for those scenarios.
Assuming a gargantuan encoding slowdown, even in the face of hardware-based encoders on mobile devices (which, again: hardware decoding/encoding is the fact of the matter on how it will happen), then there's no reason to support AV1 encoders since it will hurt battery. You're better off with something else, because users care more about their battery than compression ratios or minor artifacts on their Insta videos.
Assuming no gargantuan slowdown, and devices are equipped with AV1 encoders that perform admirably, then your problem is solved. Just use the hardware encoder. (Personally, it's unclear to me how much of AV1 encode support is fundamental slowness that can't be mitigated by hardware and implementation, but I suspect a lot of this fear is tied up in early-stage numbers. I bet it can go much faster, even if it's still slower overall.)
If you're a media provider like Netflix for example, though, the bandwidth savings will utterly dwarf the cost of the more expensive encoding process. They encode once and serve thousands of times, and they don't run Netflix (the company) on old mobile phones. So they'll do it anyway, because they want their users to use AV1. It saves them bandwidth on a high quality video, and it saves users on their data plans and their battery.
This isn't really very hard to think about. Either AV1 encoding is fundamentally too inefficient for mobile, or it isn't. If it isn't, users can still get fast decoders (that wasn't the bottleneck), since the bandwidth savings are going to be highly desirable for everyone, basically, and they'll be pushed for. If they can be efficient enough, then there's no problem.
The problem is that reference implementations of AV1 are 100x slower than HEVC at encoding. And so hardware decoding may ether be (a) impossible on current devices or (b) likely to destroy battery life. The only option is some breakthrough in the complexity of the encoding algorithm.
These issues unless solved relegates AV1 to being a Youtube and Netflix format and pretty much irrelevant for everyone else.
> Youtube and Netflix and pretty much irrelevant for anyone else
I like it when the goalposts move in such a way that "used by services in over 50% of US households and services where 70% of all video usage come from mobile, and offers excellent bandwidth improvements for millions of users" apparently means AV1 is a failure, somehow, based on preliminary numbers for a use case (encoding) that largely isn't relevant to mobile devices (and will improve dramatically over time making encoding more usable, anyway, as all prior codecs did.)
Unfortunately for the AV1 designers, they could have realized this fatal flaw sooner, had they only consulted the grand expertise of..... a random internet forum user.
>Reference implementations are not about performance, they are documentation. They are not supposed to be used for anything else but documentation.
That is valid for all H.262 , H.263, H.264 and H.265, as well as the up coming H.266 VVC. The current Av1 isn't a documentation. Nor it is a Reference Implementation in the regards of all MEPG codec. The AV1 is built on a working, professionally made libvpx encoder built on VP9.
>There is absolutely not reason assume that av1 is fundamentaly more power consuming that HEVC.
It definitely will be more complex, both encoding and decoding. Its fundamental complexity is much higher then HEVC, how far could they optimise so they are close to 5 - 10x of HEVC is a different story.
>And so hardware decoding may ether be (a) impossible on current devices or (b) likely to destroy battery life.
The development of the codec has been done with constant input from the hardware developers who are backing AV1 (Intel,AMD,Broadcom,NVidia etc) in order to make it effective when used with hardware acceleration. Just watch some of the developer presentations on Youtube.
Your fear that all the streaming and hardware giants would cooperately develop a codec that won't be effective on mobile hardware is unfounded.
The most computationally efficient encoding algorithms can do hundreds of frames per second at 720p even on mobile. The price you pay is quality and filesize - it'll be large and look awful.
So people aren't using Snapchat, Instagram Stories, FaceTime, IGTV ?
Because pretty sure encoding is just as important as decoding.