How Meta Deploys AV1 on Facebook From Reels to Stories to Messenger
As video has taken center stage on Facebook in recent years with the proliferation of Reels and Stories, AV1 deployment has become increasingly central to Meta’s video strategy, reports Meta technical program manager Hassene Tmar in this conversation with Streaming Learning Center owner Jan Ozer from Streaming Media Connect 2025. Tmar explains why AV1 now accounts for 70% of video delivered on Facebook, whether VOD or live on Messenger, and why his team has been pushing it for several years now.
Why AV1?
Ozer asks, “Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what Meta is doing with AV1?”
“At Meta, we started pushing AV1 in VOD on Reels since [the] 2021-2022 timeframe,” Tmar explains. “And we started with iOS where we pushed AV1 decoding in software at the time with an awesome open source library called … dav1d and using the SVT-AV1 open source encoder on the software side. We deployed … AV1 and what we refer to as our premium encoding.” He suggests reading the Engineering at Meta blog post on the subject for more information
Tmar notes that for a video uploaded to Meta, “if it’s viewed only by a small number of viewers, then they get the basic encoding because their cost of distribution is not too high. If they’re viewed by so many, maybe thousands or millions of people, then they get what’s called a premium encoding where we maintain a good quality and reduce the bitrate so that we get a much better, much faster distribution.”
Initially, AV1 was seen “as a quality-boosting tool,” but Tmar and his team found that it’s dependent on user needs—for example, in North America, users tend to appreciate quality more because phone technology is so advanced. In other regions, users “appreciate that bitrate reduction so that they can literally get the video [at all], especially with the very low bandwidth networks. And the rest is kind of somewhere in between. So we don’t really have a flat number on bitrate savings because it’s tuned differently for different apps, different surfaces, different regions, depending on the needs of the users for those regions,” he says. Tmar references the blog post again; it shows that when using “the AV1 screensharing tool, you can go up to maybe even 60% on top of even VP9 in that space.” Tmar sees these as “great results.”
AV1 at Meta Today
Tmar looks at the present moment: He’s “happy to say that AV1 covers about 70% of all of Meta’s watch, which means that doing simple math, if we have about three billion users, every user, every daily active user watches one minute of video per day, that’s 70% of three billion minutes of video basically.
Ozer wonders if he’s referring to Reels or the entire catalog, and Tmar clarifies, “Yeah, it’s pretty much everything now. So Reels, Stories, feed on the video on demand space.”
“What about live video? What’s your take on when that will happen?” Ozer asks.
Tmar isn’t able to answer that, he says, but he does note that Meta is “seeing great results for AV1 on video calling.” He explains, “Today with Messenger, you’re probably using AV1 in some space or the other. Especially with its screensharing tools and lower bitrate, it allows calls to be much smoother, [and have] less freezes, less jitters, longer calls. So all of those are benefits that we are seeing.” He hopes to be able to publish results on this topic soon. He can’t say any numbers publicly yet, “but we promise to get out with some good description on what we’re doing there and what we’re seeing,” which is: “overall great benefits for the users.”
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