I was curious, so I looked it up. AV1 is more efficient than HEVC by like 28%! On the downside, encoding is horrifically slooow. It’ll be interesting to see how much hardware support AV1 gets in the coming years, because encoding time will have a dramatic effect on its adoption rate.

Interesting to note: AV1 can be played in Kodi, Plex, Emby, Jellyfin, VLC, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera. So on the software side, it’s pretty widely supported.

They didn’t say that. They just said it’s better, but didn’t mention their rationale. But IMHO opinion, it being FOSS makes it about a million times better than HEVC alone