2015: An Alliance Against the Patent Nightmare
The history of AVIF does not begin in an imaging lab, but in a patent-politics crisis. In the mid-2010s, two patent pools controlled the world's dominant video codecs: MPEG LA administered the H.264 patents, HEVC Advance was added for H.265 — and both charged streaming platforms licensing fees that could run into the billions at scale. Netflix, YouTube, Amazon and others faced a choice: pay up, or build their own royalty-free format.
In September 2015, seven tech companies founded the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia): Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix. Later joined by Apple (2018), Facebook, Nvidia, Samsung and others. The shared goal: an open-source, royalty-free next-generation video codec — AV1. The final specification appeared in June 2018.
2019: AV1 Becomes AVIF
AV1 was a video codec. But as with WebP before it (see our WebP history), the leap to an image format was an obvious one: a single AV1 keyframe already contains all the intra-frame compression tools needed for a still image. The only question was which container the bytes would be packed into.
The answer came, surprisingly, from Cupertino. In 2017, Apple had introduced the HEIF container(High Efficiency Image File Format, ISO/IEC 23008-12) for iOS 11 — originally for HEIC images with the HEVC codec, but technically codec-agnostic. AOMedia's members realized that HEIF could also carry AV1 bitstreams. In February 2019, AOMedia published the AVIF 1.0 specification— formally the “AV1 Image File Format,” a HEIF container with AV1 content.
The Technical Differentiation from WebP
AVIF brought three structural improvements over WebP. First, better compression: AV1 is a codec a good ten years younger than VP8, and it uses considerably more sophisticated prediction modes, larger block sizes (up to 128×128 instead of 16×16) and a more powerful entropy coder. Typical byte savings: 20–30 % over WebP at the same visual quality.
Second, HDR and wide color gamut: AVIF supports 10-bit and 12-bit color depths as well as BT.2020 color spaces — everything that modern display hardware (iPhone Pro, MacBook Pro with Liquid Retina XDR, OLED televisions) can actually render. WebP is limited to 8-bit standard gamut — a limitation that is coming back to bite it today. For a technical deep dive, see our AVIF Explained article.
Third, true alpha compression: WebP stores the alpha channel separately from the color channels, which can lead to double-quantization artifacts. AVIF can compress alpha within the same bitstream, with joint optimization.
Netflix as the Pilot Customer
Netflix was one of AOMedia's driving co-founders and used AVIF as its own showcase project. In February 2020, the Netflix Tech Blog published a detailed report: all of the cover artwork for films and series on netflix.com was by then being delivered as AVIF with a JPG fallback. The byte savings averaged 50 % over the previous JPG setup — for a streaming service with 200 million users, a significant traffic reduction.
The Netflix report became the reference study for AVIF in the web community. Adobe followed with AVIF export in Photoshop 22 (2021), Cloudflare shipped automatic AVIF conversion in its image-resizing service in 2021, and Vercel's Next.js Image component has supported AVIF since version 11 — anyone running Next.js 16 with modern features like on-the-fly image optimizationbenefits from it with no configuration effort.
2020–2022: The Browsers Catch Up
Browser adoption proceeded unusually fast for a new format. Chrome 85 brought AVIF in August 2020 — faster than any other browser had ever supported a new image format. Firefox 93followed in October 2021, and Edge picked it up automatically via a Chromium update. The decisive step was Safari 16 (macOS Ventura, iOS 16) in September 2022 — with that, AVIF was available in every mainstream browser after just three years.
For comparison: WebP took ten years to reach the same coverage. The difference is political: AVIF came out of an alliance to which Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla all belonged together. There was no political refusal front as there had been with WebP, which was long regarded as a Google format.
The Encoder Pains
AVIF has one practical drawback that web developers still feel in 2026: slow encoding speed. AV1 is a factor of 5–20 slower to encode than WebP, depending on the encoder. The reference implementation libaom is optimized for quality, not for speed. Faster encoders exist — SVT-AV1 (Intel/Netflix), rav1e(Mozilla, Rust) — but even the fastest of them are slower than a JPG or WebP encoder on the same CPU.
In the browser context this means: browsers can decode AVIF, but no browser can actively encode it (the Canvas API does not know image/avif as an output format). Anyone who wants to generate AVIF client-side needs a WebAssembly library such as libavif-wasm, which, depending on image size, costs several seconds of encoding time. For that reason, our WebP compressor delivers WebP by default rather than AVIF — fast, browser-native encoding is decisive for interactive tools.
AVIF and Animation
Since AVIF 1.1 (2023), the format has also supported animation sequences. Technically this is an AV1 video packed into the HEIF container, with timing metadata. Efficiency is another 30–50 % higher than animated WebP; against classic GIFs, often 90 %. Browser support in 2026 is available in Chrome, Firefox and Safari. For a detailed recommendation, see our GIF vs. WebP article, which now covers AVIF as well.
The Unresolved JPEG XL Rivalry
AVIF's dominance is not untarnished. JPEG XL (see our JPEG XL history article) offers structural advantages for photographic content and can losslessly re-compress existing JPEGs — something AVIF cannot do. In 2023, Google had removed JPEG XL from Chrome; in 2025 it returned. The format politics of the coming years will show whether AVIF remains the universal default choice, or whether JPEG XL conquers the photography niche.
When AVIF Is the Right Choice
- Server-side image optimization. When encoding happens offline, only decoder performance matters — and that is excellent.
- HDR content and photographic quality. 10-bit, BT.2020, the best available compression — ideal for streaming platforms and photo galleries.
- Static Site Generation. Build-time AVIF generation is standard in modern frameworks; see our note on Core Web Vitals.
- Mobile performance. Smaller bytes = better LCP times on 4G/5G.
When AVIF is not ideal: real-time client-side encoding (too slow), workflows that involve Photoshop CC versions before 22 or legacy third-party software, and print pipelines (print shops often do not accept AVIF).
Sources
AVIF 1.0 Specification (AOMedia) · Alliance for Open Media · Netflix Tech Blog — AVIF for Next-Generation Image Coding · RFC 9264 — AV1 Image File Format Brands · libavif source code · Can I Use — AVIF Browser Support · ISO/IEC 23008-12 — High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF), 2017.