Adopting AV1 for Real-Time Communication (RTC) at Scale#
@Scale: Product 2026 digest Program Adjacent pick 28 October 2026
- Why: A multi-year fleet-wide codec adoption story — codec selection, device eligibility, rate control, error resilience — structurally similar to rolling out any new technology across a heterogeneous fleet (new transport, new silicon, new protocol). The operational lessons (eligibility gating, gradual coverage expansion) transfer well.
- What: Meta's multi-year effort adopting AV1 for real-time communication: the technical and operational challenges of deploying AV1 and expanding coverage, and several technologies for improving AV1 call quality, including rate control and error resilience. (from abstract only)
- How: Not detailed in the abstract; a companion engineering blog post ("Adopting AV1 for real-time communication at Meta") is linked from the session and is the better source for mechanics.
- Where applicable: Meta's RTC fleet. AV1 deployment is gated by hardware decode coverage across the device fleet — silicon- and device-tier-dependent — so eligibility policy is as much of the story as the codec itself. The staged-rollout playbook generalizes to other fleet-wide technology migrations.