This was brought up on stream with Dan Clancy on Harris' stream (Senpai Gaming) about 1 hour and 20 minutes in. From the time of this post it was 2-3 days ago.

There was brief talks about how expensive it is to ingest data, but mainly transcoding. AV1 transcoding is more expensive than h.264 in compute time. Something that is in the works is client side transcoding, which would offload the strain on their older servers, and this strategy would support AV1.

Clancy said there is no current timeline, thought of mentioning some of their plans at Twitchcon but opted against it.

they could add av1 support encode/decode for twitch turbo users, as it is, its not worth it the price for just add free on streams.

AV1 encoding would help those using AMD 7000 GPUs. AMDs Encoding engine is still horrible.

we need AV1 encoding. Why would you let people dual stream but not have AV1 encoding?

I've been asking for AV1 support myself. The difference in stream quality is night and day. I hope that they adopt it soon.

And so the topic continues, I really think it will take a while before they put anything out about AV1, if so far we haven't had anything and we have already had large ones implementing this for other cases with discord and YouTube, I think it will take a while longer here, especially because , the focus here will always be large content producers, that is, these people have dedicated machines just for streaming, they generally use capture cards and things started to have decent 4k support only in the last few months.

Twitch is focused on 1080p and 720p, people only consume this content and most of the time from people who have a dedicated computer for that. So they didn't have to invest in it until it was really necessary.

There is Amazon behind it, which is a leader in Infrastructure to do anything related to this, if they were interested they would have already done something related. And as some people have already said here, people don't yet have devices to consume Av1, anything that was done would mean decoding it to another decoder which would generate more processing in the cloud. And that.

I really wanted Av1 soon, but it will take a while in my opinion. Or let's go to YouTube and watch it there. Which won't happen because people who transmit content still prefer to use things here, which I think is valid, because it's a platform dedicated to that, right?

I would like to see Av1 on twirch

Often times I can't watch a Twitch stream on Mobile because the streamer is using way too high of a bitrate and they don't have quality options available, so instead of being able to watch I just have to leave. If they could use half or maybe 2/3 the bitrate or whatever, then I might be able to actually watch. Maybe HEVC would be a better stepping stone since it's standard and pretty much all devices can decode it directly now.

Irl streamers aren’t going to be able to use AV1 mobile hardware can’t encode AV1, only a few of them even support AV1 decode to even watch it. And it’s not that I just think that most won’t push max quality go look at av1 steams on YouTube. Almost all of them are 1440p and 4K streams so the trend will follow the same on twitch. Again I want AV1 but it’s not gonna be a cost save for twitch on anything other than VODs and Clips. And livestream cost saving is going to be so negligible that it isn’t even gonna make a dent in their cost to deliver, and an ROI period on something like an entire overhaul of their encode/decode hardware would be YEARS to recoup.

Then factor in that majority of users on any hardware older the last 2 gen, plus mobile, and TVs, don’t support native AV1 decode. So just like YouTube they’d have to re-encode the stream on their hardware to a more compatible codec for those users to even be able to watch the stream.

Again they should add it because we deserve to be able to have the same quality as other platforms but the cost saving argument isn’t valid.

Just because you dont think less than max will be used, does not mean that that is true. I actually see it allot. Especially people on mobile phone tether bad internet or not so good computer

Think of IRL streamers, using mobile phones and the likes. Tldr, plenty of peeps dont stream at max bitrate

Yes I understand it’s more efficient, but when on twitch do you see anyone using less than the maximum bitrate cap. Unless they enforce specific bitrates based on resolution it’s not going to change anything. People stream 720p30 at 6000kbs because everyone will just use the maximum whenever given the chance. I understand the math and efficiency gains of AV1, I use it for my home video server to save on storage. But I also am not gonna pretend like the second they add it everyone is going to just lower their bitrate on their own to 2.5k they’re gonna bump their stream quality as high as possible with the max bitrate.

Just call it for what it is instead of trying to gaslight circumstances that won’t happen, they should upgrade hardware to give twitch a competitive edge, let us stream higher quality streams instead of decade old codecs especially when competitors are allowing it, don’t beat around the bush their engineers know people won’t use it to save streaming costs people will just just up to higher res streams just like it’s happening on YouTube.

I'm not going to explain it to you and even less to someone who has a closed mentality to temporary video on demand, like youtube, twitch is a stream platform, and with AV1 it will allow 3000kb to be seen well at 1080p and use 6000kb for example for 2k, and someone in latin america for example could see that stream at 1080p that before could not, if you are not able to understand that, I'm not going to answer you anymore, I made clear in my previous comment the summary, less bandwidth needed to have quality, is less maintenance cost, if you don't understand that 2+2 is 4, it's not my problem.

@spartandraco how would it bring more profit. People are still gonna stream at the max bitrate cap, delivering the data is what costs, so unless they added av1 and then lowered the bitrate cap to reflect AV1 efficiency it wouldn’t save any money people are still gonna stream at 6k but just push a higher quality than 6k allowed on nvenc or x264. It could save cost in vod storage and clip storage but that’s marginal overhead compared to IVS

people who say that switching to AV1 would not bring more profit, should first think about what it is like to have more than 1 million people stream simultaneously.

"Twitch that still haven't implemented AV1 encoding for streamers. Without broader support from major partners, it's all moot"

@3v All their big partners are being paid to use nvidia hardware.

Delete all those ads from streamings and add this BEAUTY.

And to answer AVMortwake’s comment about AWS using AV1 for years that’s true. But twitch doesn’t use AWS they use IVS which is a completely different from AWS

For those of you who are asking “why” it’s pretty simple. AV1 isn’t just something they “turn on” for people to use it would require significant amounts of money in the millions in upgrading their server hardware to be capable of AV1 decode and encode. Which for someone like twitch the investment isn’t paid off as rapidly, while they’d save more money in video storage in the format of clips and vods. The cost saving doesn’t make as much sense as for someone like YouTube that’s entire business is video on demand vs live video hosting.

Would they eventually get an ROI, yes, but it would take years to recoup the cost of upgrading every server so that’s why the roll out will probably be incredibly slow, and more than likely a partnered limited feature.

As it stands with twitch it’s more of a feature add to streamers rather than an actual investment into infrastructure, and we’re talking a multi million dollar feature add so the likelihood of them actually doing it in scale in marginal at best.

nvidia has been at the forefront of pushing av1 adoption.. why would they be against it?

Why? "Because Greedvidia wouldn't like it that's why. Paying twitch off to not add it.