AVIF for Next-Generation Image Coding
I&#x27;m going to put my cynical hat on for a bit and notice that the company behind this format, Netflix, has a walled garden. They have a streaming service that is consumed <i>only</i> through a handful of apps that they are in full control of. They&#x27;re not doing this for the community, for web standards, or the greater good. They&#x27;re making this format simply to save some bandwidth for themselves, in a way that won&#x27;t translate to the general community. The second picture in the linked blog article is literally a diagram of this garden. (Titled: <i>&quot;Compressed image assets destined for various client devices...&quot;</i>)<p>I had a similar comment about the JPEG XL format (mostly developed by Google) and the CSS &quot;Display P3&quot; colour space extension (Apple), both recently featured on YCombinator. These mega-corporations are building an ecosystem where in 2020, <i>the future</i>, it&#x27;s impossible to send a wide-gamut, 10-bit, or HDR still image to anyone via any of the following: web standards, chat, email, or document exchange formats. The best you can do is send an 8-bit SDR sRGB image and hope for the best. PC monitors, tablets, and most phones have no <i>consistent</i> support for colour management, 10-bit, or HDR. Televisions are leaving the entire PC <i>and</i> Mobile ecosystem in the dust. The closest approximation we PC peasants have is to upload a HDR YouTube video, send a link to it, and hope the viewer uses an newish iPhone. That&#x27;s just sad, isn&#x27;t it?<p>The stewardship of web standards by Microsoft (#2 biggest company), Apple (#3), and Alphabet Group (#4) have led to this. Now Netflix (#50) wants to throw their unnecessary format into the fray, almost completely ignoring the presence of JPEG XL and HEIC. They mention these alternatives in passing, and then notably don&#x27;t compare image quality, features, or the compression ratio of those to their own format. You see, JXL is a <i>Google&#x27;s thing</i>, HEIC is an <i>Apple thing</i>, and AVIF is a <i>Netflix thing</i>. So we&#x27;re going to end up with as many image formats as there are walled gardens. I bet you too can&#x27;t wait for whatever image format Facebook comes up with specifically to reduce their CDN bandwidth utilisation of Instagram pictures... only.<p>Notice also that their &quot;idea&quot; of making an image format readily available is a <i>docker container</i>, which is the most insane thing I&#x27;ve ever seen. Where&#x27;s the Photoshop plugin? The Lightroom plugin? The Windows 10 image codec? Oh wait.. those are <i>Adobe and Microsoft things</i>, so... nowhere to be seen. Netflix Pty Ltd is not in this game to help someone <i>else&#x27;s</i> walled garden.<p>No still image interchange for you peasant! Sit down, stay in the garden, and stream that content...