keyword: Internet

eve-is-rolling-out-thread-support-to-more-of-its-smart-home-lineup

Eve is rolling out Thread support to more of its smart home lineup

Eve Systems, a maker of smart home products that work with Apple’s HomeKit platform, is announcing an expanded range of devices that support the Thread smart protocol. The news consists of updated versions of its existing smart plug, a forthcoming firmware update for the company’s smart sprinkler, and a new outdoor weather station.

Thread is a wireless communication standard that was developed from the ground up for smart home purposes and is designed to replace legacy technologies such as Z-Wave and Zigbee. Benefits of Thread include more reliable connections between devices, faster response times, and longer battery life.

Though Thread support has existed in a handful of devices for quite some time, Apple’s HomePod mini is the first one to really make Thread a viable option in the smart home. It can act as a bridge between Thread-enabled accessories and connect them to the internet, which they can’t do on their own. Thread is also one of the pillar technologies of the Connected Home over IP (CHIP) project, a cooperation between all the major smart home platform and device providers to standardize around an interoperable wireless protocol.

It’s with that in mind that Eve is updating and expanding its device portfolio. The new Eve Energy, which will be available in either US or UK versions, is an updated version of Eve’s smart plug. It will support both Thread and Bluetooth and will be available in the US starting on April 6th and the UK starting on May 4th. The Energy is unique in that it can act as a repeater for the Thread network, letting it extend the signal to devices even if they are out of reach of a HomePod mini. In the US, the Energy will cost $39.95.

The latest version of the Eve Energy smart plug adds Thread support.
Image: Eve

A forthcoming firmware update will add Thread support to the $99.95 Eve Aqua, the company’s smart sprinkler system. Thanks to Thread’s greater range, the updated Aqua can maintain its connection to the network better than it could with just Bluetooth. Eve says support for Thread will be released in April.

Lastly, the all-new Eve Weather is a wireless outdoor weather station that allows you to track the exact outdoor temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure at your home. It is a replacement for the Eve Degree, a similar product that relied solely on Bluetooth for its connectivity. The Eve Weather has a monochrome display that shows the current temperature, humidity, and weather conditions; the Eve app provides access to trends over time and more specific data. The Weather also has Siri integration for voice queries.

Eve claims the Weather is IPX3 water resistant and is specifically designed for outdoor use. It runs on a coin cell battery which should last between six and 12 months before needing to be replaced. The Eve Weather will be available starting March 25th for $69.95.

The Eve Weather shows current temperature, humidity, and weather trends on its monochrome display.
Image: Eve

These aren’t the only products in Eve’s portfolio that support Thread. The company has already issued firmware updates with Thread support for its door and window sensors and European-spec Energy smart plug, and it says everything it has released since June 2020 has the hardware necessary to work with Thread. It is one of the first companies to really throw its hat into the Thread ring in a meaningful way.

Eve is a unique company in the smart home market as its products only work with Apple’s HomeKit platform and don’t support Amazon Alexa, Google Home, or any of the other platforms out there. That’s different from most other smart home companies, which try to reach the broadest possible audience by supporting the most popular platforms, which often means Amazon Alexa and Google Home. The HomeKit device ecosystem is much smaller in comparison, largely thanks to an onerous hardware certification that Apple used to require and has since rolled back. HomeKit is also completely inaccessible from outside of Apple’s ecosystem, so if you have an Android phone, you can’t control Eve devices.

Eve System’s CEO Jerome Gackel told me the company’s goal isn’t just to be a HomeKit accessory maker. It’s just that Apple’s platform is the only one that allows Eve to focus its efforts on its devices and apps without having to also maintain a cloud service to allow them to connect to the internet. All of the processing for Eve devices happens locally on your home network or between your own devices, without sending data to the cloud, which helps the company achieve its goal of a privacy-first smart home. (You can still remotely control Eve devices through Apple’s Home app, provided you have a HomeKit hub, such as an Apple TV, HomePod, or iPad running in your home.)

Gackel hopes that support for Thread and its key role in the CHIP project will open the door to working with the other smart home platforms in the future. But Eve won’t work with Alexa or Google Home so long as they continue to require a cloud connection to their platforms.

Eve’s bet on HomeKit has been successful so far — the company already has 18 products in its lineup and claims sales of over 1 million units by 2019, with two-thirds of its customer base in Germany and the rest in the US. Its lineup for 2021 will make it the largest provider of HomeKit accessories, with Thread support being a recurring theme throughout.

senators-call-on-fcc-to-quadruple-base-high-speed-internet-speeds

Senators call on FCC to quadruple base high-speed internet speeds

The federal government’s definition of high-speed broadband has remained stagnant over the last six years, sitting at 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up since 2015. But faced with pandemic-fueled network loads and a new push for infrastructure spending, lawmakers are getting ready to upgrade that definition. In a letter to government leaders Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators called for a quadrupling of base high-speed broadband delivery speeds making 100Mbps down and 100Mbps up the new base for high-speed broadband.

“Going forward, we should make every effort to spend limited federal dollars on broadband networks capable of providing sufficient download and upload speeds and quality,” Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CO), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Angus King (I-ME), and Rob Portman (R-OH) wrote to the FCC and other agencies. “There is no reason federal funding to rural areas should not support the type of speeds used by households in typical well-served urban and suburban areas.”

The letter calls on the FCC and other agencies to change their definitions of “high speed broadband” to anything above 100Mbps down and 100Mbps up — a shift that would prohibit the FCC from identifying an area as being served with broadband unless it met those speed criteria. It’s a complete change of pace from the FCC under former Chairman Ajit Pai’s leadership, which established the previous 25 / 3Mbps standard.

“We find that the current speed benchmark of 25/3 Mbps remains an appropriate measure by which to assess whether a fixed service is providing advanced telecommunications capability,” the FCC’s report said earlier this year.

The current base speeds for high-speed broadband aren’t nearly enough for a moderately sized family working from home. Zoom recommends 3.8Mbps upload speeds for just one 1080p video, and the shift to remote schooling and work has forced many families to run multiple simultaneous streams.

“Ask any senior who connects with their physician via telemedicine, any farmer hoping to unlock the benefits of precision agriculture, or any student who receives livestreamed instruction, or any family where both parents telework and multiple children are remote learning, and they will tell you that many networks fail to come close to ‘high speed’ in the year 2021,” the senators wrote.

Updated 3/4/21 at 8:15AM ET: Updated quotes to reflect final text of the letter.

nfts,-explained

NFTs, explained

There’s nothing like an explosion of blockchain news to leave you thinking, “Um… what’s going on here?” That’s the feeling I’ve experienced while reading about Grimes getting millions of dollars for NFTs or about Nyan Cat being sold as one.

You might be wondering: what is an NFT, anyhow?

After literal hours of reading, I think I know. I also think I’m going to cry.

Okay, let’s start with the basics. What is an NFT? What does NFT stand for?

Non-fungible token.

That doesn’t make it any clearer.

Right, sorry. “Non-fungible” more or less means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced with something else. For example, a bitcoin is fungible — trade one for another bitcoin, and you’ll have exactly the same thing. A one-of-a-kind trading card, however, is non-fungible. If you traded it for a different card, you’d have something completely different. You gave up a Squirtle, and got a 1909 T206 Honus Wagner, which StadiumTalk calls “the Mona Lisa of baseball cards.” (I’ll take their word for it.)

How do NFTs work?

At a very high level, most NFTs are part of the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency, like bitcoin or dogecoin, but its blockchain also supports these NFTs, which store extra information that makes them work differently from, say, an ETH coin. It is worth noting that other blockchains can implement their own versions of NFTs. (Some already have.)

What’s worth picking up at the NFT supermarket?

NFTs can really be anything digital (such as drawings, music, your brain downloaded and turned into an AI), but a lot of the current excitement is around using the tech to sell digital art.

You mean, like, people buying my good tweets?

I don’t think anyone can stop you, but that’s not really what I meant. A lot of the conversation is about NFTs as an evolution of fine art collecting, only with digital art.

Do people really think this will become like art collecting?

I’m sure some people really hope so — like whoever paid almost $390,000 for a 50-second video by Grimes or the person who paid $6.6 million for a video by Beeple. Actually, one of Beeple’s pieces is being auctioned at Christie’s, the famou—

Yoink!
Image: Beeple

Sorry, I was busy right-clicking on that Beeple video and downloading the same file the person paid millions of dollars for.

Wow, rude. But yeah, that’s where it gets a bit awkward. You can copy a digital file as many times as you want, including the art that’s included with an NFT.

But NFTs are designed to give you something that can’t be copied: ownership of the work (though the artist can still retain the copyright and reproduction rights, just like with physical artwork). To put it in terms of physical art collecting: anyone can buy a Monet print. But only one person can own the original.

No shade on Beeple, but the video isn’t really a Monet.

What do you think of the $3,600 Gucci Ghost?

This last sold for $3,600, but the current owner is asking for $16,300.
GIF by Trevor Andrew

Also, if I got a Monet, I could appreciate it as a physical object. With digital art, a copy is literally as good as the original.

But the flex of owning an original Beeple…

What’s the point?

That really depends on whether you’re an artist or a buyer.

I’m an artist.

First off: I’m proud of you. Way to go. You might be interested in NFTs because it gives you a way to sell work that there otherwise might not be much of a market for. If you come up with a really cool digital sticker idea, what are you going to do? Sell it on the iMessage App Store? No way.

Also, NFTs have a feature that you can enable that will pay you a percentage every time the NFT is sold or changes hands, making sure that if your work gets super popular and balloons in value, you’ll see some of that benefit.

I’m a buyer.

One of the obvious benefits of buying art is it lets you financially support artists you like, and that’s true with NFTs (which are way trendier than, like, Telegram stickers). Buying an NFT also usually gets you some basic usage rights, like being able to post the image online or set it as your profile picture. Plus, of course, there are bragging rights that you own the art, with a blockchain entry to back it up.

No, I meant I’m a collector.

Ah, okay, yes. NFTs can work like any other speculative asset, where you buy it and hope that the value of it goes up one day, so you can sell it for a profit. I feel kind of dirty for talking about that, though.

So every NFT is unique?

In the boring, technical sense that every NFT is a unique token on the blockchain. But while it could be like a van Gogh, where there’s only one definitive actual version, it could also be like a trading card, where there’s 50 or hundreds of numbered copies of the same artwork.

Who would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for what basically amounts to a trading card?

Well, that’s part of what makes NFTs so messy. Some people treat them like they’re the future of fine art collecting (read: as a playground for the mega-rich), and some people treat them like Pokémon cards (where they’re accessible to normal people but also a playground for the mega-rich). Speaking of Pokémon cards, Logan Paul just sold some NFTs relating to a million-dollar box of the—

Please stop. I hate where this is going.

You’ve activated my trap card (which sold for $17,000).
Image by Logan Paul

Yeah, he sold NFT video clips, which are just clips from a video you can watch on YouTube anytime you want, for up to $20,000. He also sold NFTs of a Logan Paul Pokémon card.

Who paid $20,000 for a video clip of Logan Paul?!

A fool and their money are soon parted, I guess?

It would be hilarious if Logan Paul decided to sell 50 more NFTs of the exact same video.

Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda (who also sold some NFTs that included a song) actually talked about that. It’s totally a thing someone could do if they were, in his words, “an opportunist crooked jerk.” I’m not saying that Logan Paul is that, just that you should be careful who you buy from.

Can I buy this article as an NFT?

No, but technically anything digital could be sold as an NFT. deadmau5 has sold digital animated stickers. William Shatner has sold Shatner-themed trading cards (one of which was apparently an X-ray of his teeth).

This one I like. Maybe not for $700, but…
Image by deadmau5 and Mad Dog Jones

Gross. Actually, could I buy someone’s teeth as an NFT?

There have been some attempts at connecting NFTs to real-world objects, often as a sort of verification method. Nike has patented a method to verify sneakers’ authenticity using an NFT system, which it calls CryptoKicks. But so far, I haven’t found any teeth, no. I’m scared to look.

Look? Where?

There are several marketplaces that have popped up around NFTs, which allow people to buy and sell. These include OpenSea, Rarible, and Grimes’ choice, Nifty Gateway, but there are plenty of others.

I’ve heard there were kittens involved. Tell me about the kittens.

NFTs really became technically possible when the Ethereum blockchain added support for them as part of a new standard. Of course, one of the first uses was a game called CryptoKitties that allowed users to trade and sell virtual kittens. Thank you, internet.

I love kittens.

Not as much as the person who paid over $170,000 for one.

My face when I’m worth $170K.
Image: Cryptokitties.co

Arrrrrggggg!

Same. But in my opinion, the kittens show that one of the most interesting aspects of NFTs (for those of us not looking to create a digital dragon’s lair of art) is how they can be used in games. There are already games that let you have NFTs as items. One even sells virtual plots of land as NFTs. There could be opportunities for players to buy a unique in-game gun or helmet or whatever as an NFT, which would be a flex that most people could actually appreciate.

Could I pull off a museum heist to steal NFTs?

This image is not an NFT. Yet.
Image: Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers

That depends. Part of the allure of blockchain is that it stores a record of each time a transaction takes place, making it harder to steal and flip than, say, a painting hanging in a museum. That said, cryptocurrencies have been stolen before, so it really would depend on how the NFT is being stored and how much work a potential victim would be willing to put in to get their stuff back.

Note: Please don’t steal.

Should I be worried about digital art being around in 500 years?

Probably. Bit rot is a real thing: image quality deteriorates, file formats can’t be opened anymore, websites go down, people forget the password to their wallets. But physical art in museums is also shockingly fragile.

I want to maximize my blockchain use. Can I buy NFTs with cryptocurrencies?

Yes. Probably. A lot of the marketplaces accept Ethereum. But technically, anyone can sell an NFT, and they could ask for whatever currency they want.

Will trading my Logan Paul NFTs contribute to global warming and melt Greenland?

It’s definitely something to look out for. Since NFTs use the same blockchain technology as cryptocurrencies, they could also end up using a lot of electricity per transaction. There are people working on mitigations for this issue, which is great because I don’t want to set the world on fire for CryptoKitties, much less Logan Paul.

Can I build an underground art cave / bunker to store my NFTs?

Well, like cryptocurrencies, NFTs are stored in digital wallets (though it is worth noting that the wallet does specifically have to be NFT-compatible). You could always put the wallet on a computer in an underground bunker, though.

Are you tired of typing “NFT”?

Yes.

with-‘starbase’-and-a-new-starlink-factory,-musk-deepens-foray-into-texas

With ‘Starbase’ and a new Starlink factory, Musk deepens foray into Texas

Pieces of SpaceX’s ambitious plans to expand its sizable foothold in Texas were on full display this week in three very different corners of the internet. CEO Elon Musk speculated on Twitter about a proposed city in Texas named Starbase, while new job descriptions on the company’s website hinted at an anticipated “state of the art” factory for mass-producing Starlink satellites. And the company made its latest move in a protracted legal fight for a methane-rich piece of land that will supply fuel for Starship.

Here’s a breakdown of the latest details.

Starbase, Texas

Musk, who has said he’s moving to Texas and committed to more projects in the state last year to spite California’s pandemic restrictions, said on Tuesday he’s aiming to create a city called “Starbase” in Texas, teasing a new idea on Twitter as his space company expands its footprint elsewhere in the state.

That footprint, first planted in the Lone Star state over a decade ago, is growing rapidly under Musk’s dogged effort to build a “gateway to Mars.” SpaceX is headquartered in Hawthorne, California, but development for its Mars rocket Starship is primarily based in the more business-friendly state of Texas. Local and state incentives and wealth of prime real estate for building reusable, orbital-class rockets have catered to Musk’s speedy development timeline.

“Creating the city of Starbase, Texas,” he tweeted on Tuesday, adding in a response to a Twitter user that Starbase would encompass “an area much larger than Boca Chica” — the small community in south Texas that’s currently home to SpaceX’s growing test and production facility for Starship.

Creating the city of Starbase, Texas

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 2, 2021

SpaceX hasn’t made any official effort to rename Boca Chica, besides approaching county officials with the idea of incorporating a city in recent days, officials in Cameron County said.

“If SpaceX and Elon Musk would like to pursue down this path, they must abide by all state incorporation statutes,” Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño said in a statement. “Cameron County will process any appropriate petitions in conformity with applicable law.”

Starlink factory

Musk’s Starbase tweet came as SpaceX posted a new job opening for remote engineers in Austin, where it said the company is “breaking ground on a new, state of the art manufacturing facility” that will aim to “manufacture millions of consumer facing devices that we ship directly to customers (Starlink dishes, Wi-Fi routers, mounting hardware, etc).”

“Up to 25% travel to SpaceX Headquarters in Los Angeles, until Austin facility is fully established,” one of the job requirements for the position read. The Starlink manufacturing facility would become Musk’s second Austin-based venture. Last year, Musk announced that Tesla would build Gigafactory Texas, a $1 billion, 4-5 million square foot facility currently under construction. Musk has said it will “basically be an ecological paradise” for the public and the company’s expected workforce of 5,000 employees.

Musk’s shift from California seems to be accelerating SpaceX’s growth in Texas that began several years ago. In 2013, Texas created a Spaceport Development Corporation that has since doled out $13.2 million in economic incentives for SpaceX. And the company’s rocket engine development facility in McGregor, Texas, first leased in 2003, is undergoing a $10 million upgrade, with $2 million in subsidies from local governments.

La Pita Wells

Two LLCs created by SpaceX, Dogleg Park and Lone Star Mineral Development, have been buying up dozens of properties in Boca Chica surrounding the company’s Starship plant. A few miles from Boca Chica, Lone Star secured an oil and gas lease from a company called Sanchez Oil and Gas Corporation to revive two inactive wells dubbed La Pita Wells. SpaceX plans to use the wells to extract methane, one of the two propellants used for its new Raptor engine that powers Starship.

But in true SpaceX fashion, the situation has gotten complicated. Lone Star’s bid to operate the wells now faces a legal fight. Dallas Petroleum Group, an oil and gas company operating in South Texas, says it owns the wells. In a lawsuit waged against SpaceX’s LLCs and Sanchez, Dallas Petroleum Group is demanding that the court force Sanchez to put the wells back in DPG’s name. SpaceX’s Lone Star argues that the wells have been inactive for years, making them ripe for a new lease.

In a closing statement filed on Monday, Lone Star attorneys said DPG “is not really planning to operate the La Pita Wells,” and its lawsuit to overturn Lone Star’s lease is “part of its plan to extract money from SpaceX.”

“The hope is that [SpaceX] can produce these properties by reentering these inactive wells and restoring the production for use in connection with their rocket facility operations,” an attorney for Lone Star said during a January hearing. In the Monday filing, Lone Star attorneys noted SpaceX and its LLC “have a unique ability to utilize the natural gas with different economic incentives…”

On SpaceX’s careers page, the company is looking for legal counsel who can help “negotiate complex construction and vendor contracts related to space/airport infrastructure development.”

project-gucciberg-offers-classic-audiobooks-read-by-an-ai-deepfake-of-gucci-mane

Project Gucciberg offers classic audiobooks read by an AI deepfake of Gucci Mane

Ever wanted to have Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis read to you by trap god Gucci Mane, creator of such hits as “Lemonade” and “Wasted”? Well, a) that’s an awfully specific desire, and b) it’s your lucky day.

Project Gucciberg is the latest drop from viral factory MSCHF, and it does exactly that. Using machine learning, MSCHF created an audio deepfake of Gucci Mane reading a selection of classic texts from Little Women to Beowulf. They’re all free to listen to and come with book covers that blend in perfectly with the artwork of Gucci Mane’s prolific discography.

The what of Project Gucciberg is luridly straightforward, but the why is harder to answer. If you’re not familiar with MSCHF, I recommend our profile of the outfit from last year. Essentially, they’re a group of VC-funded creators who make weird things designed to go viral online, like squeaky chicken bongs and Air Max 97 sneakers filled with water from the River Jordan, some of which are sold for a nominal fee. Then they ??? and profit (presumably by selling their services to companies who want things they made to go viral online).

Speaking to The Verge, MSCHF’s Dan Greenberg didn’t go into the motivation behind Project Gucciberg but was more than happy to talk about the mechanics. Audio deepfakes are now pretty common (listen to this clone of Joe Rogan for a good example), to the point where they’ve been used to commit fraud. To make one, you just need a lot of sample data of your target speaking and the right neural networks to learn and copy their mannerisms.

Greenberg says MSCHF collected around six hours of audio of Gucci Mane talking from podcasts, interviews, and the like. They then created transcriptions of the clips to help with the text-to-speech (TTS) process. This required creating a “Gucci pronunciation key/dictionary to better capture the idiosyncrasies of Gucci Mane’s particular argot.”

The redesigned book covers of Project Gucciberg are a delight to behold.

“Gucci’s pronunciation follows a very particular cadence — he uses a much greater variety of vowel sounds, for instance, than your average TTS reader would,” says Greenberg. “The dictionary breaks words up into phonemes (discrete vocal gestures) that our model then uses as building blocks … So for a simple example, we need our model to know what syllables to elide, or flow into each other across words: it needs to know to say “talm ‘bout” not ‘talking about,’ and the Gucci dictionary { T AH1 L M B AW1 T } gets us there where the written words ‘talking about’ do not.”

The results are impressive: the deepfake certainly sounds like the man himself, though the results are not always totally coherent or of the greatest quality. “Our fake Gucci Mane often sounds like he’s speaking through a bad mic, or over a low-quality internet stream, and part of this is because in the training data he often is doing exactly that,” says Greenberg.

Exactly why Gucci was chosen for this project came down to two factors, says Greenberg: one, the rapper has a distinctive voice, and two, the Project Gucciberg pun was too delicious to ignore.

Greenberg adds that MSCHF didn’t approach Gucci to ask for permission to use his voice. As a disclaimer on the site slyly points out, the whole project raises interesting questions about copyright in the age of AI fakes. ”We didn’t write the books, and we deepfaked the voice,” it says. “Is this copyright infringement? Is it identity theft? All of the training data (recordings) used to make Project Gucciberg were publicly available on the web. Gucciberg lives in that lovely grey area where everything’s new and anything goes.” It certainly is! The Verge has attempted to reach out to Gucci Mane via his record label for a response, and we’ll update this story if we hear back.

Is Project Gucciberg anything more than a quick click and a lol? Well, not really. But that’s MSCHF’s business, and they’re very good at it. While listening to more than a few minutes of the resulting audio is a little disorientating, Greenberg suggests there may be unique benefits to the coming world of on-demand deepfake celebrity audiobooks.

“Every once in a while … the extreme casualness of Gucci Mane’s narration really does put the text in a new light,” he says, speaking about the benefits of listening to the deepfake version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. “Gregor Samsa really comes across as just another guy who doesn’t want to get out of bed, you know?”

why-congress-can’t-stop-talking-about-section-230

Why Congress can’t stop talking about Section 230

There’s finally momentum in Congress to make serious changes to Section 230 — and not everyone’s happy about it. Last year’s antitrust hearings have given way to a full-court press on regulating big companies like Facebook and Google, and many in Congress see peeling back Section 230 as an easier way forward than GDPR-style privacy regulation or a full-scale antitrust breakup.

So on Monday, we hosted an event exploring what those regulations might look like, starting with a keynote on tech regulation from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). After that, we had a panel of three experts — Vimeo’s Michael Cheah, Wikimedia’s Amanda Keton, and writer and strategist Sydette Harry — dig into the details of Section 230 and how the things they care about on the internet would be affected if the law was repealed.

It made for a strange combination. On one side, Sen. Klobuchar urged the tech world not to dismiss changes to Section 230 out of hand and to leave room for the idea that some kind of regulation or antitrust action might actually make the industry better. On the other side, the panel pleaded that any changes to Section 230 be tailored to specific problems. But since no one can quite agree which problems need to be addressed, it’s a tricky bet to make.

If that sounds complicated, it is. The rise of online platforms like Facebook and YouTube has created several problems at once, and this kind of tangle is the inevitable result. There’s the antitrust problem, the misinformation problem, the hate speech problem, and half a dozen other issues. They’re all related, but fixing one will sometimes make others worse. Lawmakers are increasingly aware of the problems with online platforms, but balancing them in an actual piece of legislation will be a spectacularly difficult task.

what-is-av1?-the-8k-video-codec-coming-to-a-streaming-service-near-you

What is AV1? The 8K video codec coming to a streaming service near you

(Image credit: Philips)

Move over H.264/AVC and HEVC, there’s a new video streaming codec in town and it’s got you in its sites. AV1 is here and it’s going to be everywhere before you know it.

AV1 is an open, royalty-free video standard with an improved compression system that should allow huge data efficiency savings without reducing video quality – and that could be key going forward into a world of higher frame rates, 8K resolution, HDR standards and audio demands.

As such, AV1 brings implications for those who use services such as Netflix, Disney Plus and Prime Video; people looking to buy a new TV or media streamer; and anyone interested in 8K TV. And as a catch-all compression standard there are many uses beyond, including gaming, realtime applications such as video conferencing and anything else where video streams are required.

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What is AV1?

AV1 (AOMedia Video 1) is the the next evolution of the defacto video streaming codec across the internet. It’s planned as the successor to the HEVC (H.265) format that is currently used for 4K HDR video on platforms such as Prime Video, Apple TV+, Disney Plus and Netflix.

It was developed by the Alliance for Open Media, which counts Amazon, Apple, ARM, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia and Samsung among its members, and is designed to offer internet streaming efficiency upgrades without affecting quality. That makes it an important step in the uptake of streamed 8K video, given the more data-heavy demands of this higher-res format.

The other big advantage to the streaming giants is that AV1 is royalty-free. That means video platforms, device manufacturers and, by proxy, users can avoid the hefty licensing payments previously associated with codecs such as HEVC. With any luck, that should also grease the wheels of AV1’s evolution and development by avoiding costly, time consuming and generally prohibitive law suits and patent claims.

At the time of writing, the AV1 video codec shows anywhere up to 30 per cent more efficient compression than HEVC, and those within the Alliance for Open Media will push for even bigger gains still. After all, it’s always good to leave room to squeeze more audio and video standards into the bitstream as and when they arise.

But while all sounds good for efficiency of the compression, there is a catch – it takes much, much longer to encode videos in AV1 in the first place. Imagine capturing a video on your mobile then having to wait an age for the AV1 file to be created before you can share it.

The aim for AV1 is for significant improvement here. Realistically, it’s a problem that needs to be solved before widespread adoption can happen. Until then, expect AV1 to be a more fringe player.

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AV1 specs

(Image credit: AOAlliance)

AV1 decoders are available at different profile settings and levels, depending on each piece of hardware’s capabilities. Theoretically, though, there’s plenty of scope and the very upper limits of AV1 have not yet been defined.

For the time being, the codec can go as far as 8K at up to 120fps, involving bitrates at up to 800mbps. Bit depth for colour comes in 8-, 10- and 12-bit varieties and with colour sampling up to a 4:4:4 full pixel level.

Can I watch AV1 video now?

Google has already implemented some AV1 use onto YouTube and requires AV1 support to view its 8K videos on TV.

Netflix has also started streaming AV1 content on a few titles. In fact, the subscription giant first took on AV1 as a way of keeping costs down for Android customers. The Netflix ‘Save Data’ feature on Android devices prioritises the use of the less data-heavy AV1 streams where possible. The company has also committed to take AV1 use across the board going forward.

Vimeo has adopted AV1 for the streams of its ‘Staff picks’ channel. Facebook has promised a roll out of AV1 as browser support emerges, and Twitch has 2022 or 2023 targeted with universal support projected to arrive in 2024 or 2025.

To watch this AV1 content requires both hardware and software support, which mostly breaks down to which device you’ve got and what operating system it’s using. At the time of writing, there’s no AV1 support on MacOS or iOS.

Android (10 onwards), Chrome (70 onwards) and Linux can decode AV1 streams, as can Windows 10 devices (once updated) for certain Windows apps.

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What devices support AV1?

Any device looking to support AV1 will need to have an AV1 decoder built-in at the chip level. Compatibility to the codec cannot be added as a firmware update for most devices. That means the very vast majority of devices out there at the time of writing aren’t ready for it.

There are one or two that were future-proofed in 2020, though. Of  those, the Roku Ultra is probably your best bet to get going with AV1 content straight away, although it’s only available in the US for now.

LG’s 8K TVs from 2020 are also AV1 compatible with a decoder built into the α9 (Gen 3) processor. It’s a similar story for Samsung’s 8K sets from the same time – you can actually watch AV1-encoded 8K content from the YouTube app of those sets now.

The other notable AV1-enabled hardware is the Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards, which would make a very handy video streaming addition to most PCs.

Otherwise, it’s a list of AV1 promises but these include a particularly good one. Google recently announced that any device looking to use the Android TV 10 OS produced after the 31st March 2021 deadline will need to have an AV1 decoder built in.

So, expect plenty of set-top boxes and smart TVs launched in 2021 and beyond to be ready to go and, with Google putting its foot down, all sorts of other products and services should fall in line over the next 12 months, and that’s good news for everyone. Higher quality video, here we come.

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