The mystery is who is paying whom ? Is Microsoft paying for HEVC licences ? Google ? Distributor ? Silicon vendors ? All of them ? The question above is, "Why use HEVC(pay) when AV1 exists ?". Or, "Why care about AV1 if everyone is paying ?"

> The mystery is who is paying whom ?

Hardware IP people are paying licenser people, with consumers eventually paying hardware IP people.

> "Why use HEVC(pay) when AV1 exists ?"

Because HEVC has hardware support, right now, so it's faster.

> "Why care about AV1 if everyone is paying ?"

People don't much.

>Because HEVC has hardware support, right now, so it's faster.

Most new hardware supports hardware decode for AV1 too. There were 1-2 generations prior to the current one that had HECV but not AV1, but that sample size will become irrelevant over time.

>People don't much.

Well, clearly people who make decisions do. If you ask an average person on the street if they care about HEVC or AV1, they don't. If you ask Netflix or Google, they do.

PS5, XBox One, Chromecast, iPhone, iPad, AppleTV support HEVC but not AV1.

And they represent a significant proportion of video consumption devices.

> PS5, XBox One

From https://netflixtechblog.com/bringing-av1-streaming-to-netfli...:

"Netflix has also partnered with YouTube to develop an open-source solution for an AV1 decoder on game consoles that utilizes the additional power of GPUs."

Which is one part of the problem.

But still today you can take an HEVC iPhone or GoPro video and watch it on your PS5 with full hardware encoding. This open source solution doesn't help with that.

Very very few people are probably interested in doing that.

Chrome runs on a fraction of those platforms...

> Hardware IP people are paying licenser people, with consumers eventually paying hardware IP people.

On Windows, at least, the end users have to purchase individual HEVC licenses.

"HEVC Video Extensions from Device Manufacturer" is also available for free. It should be already paid by device manufacturer.