As the halls thinned out on the last day of IBC 2025, the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing was just kicking into gear over in Alaska. The headline news from this niche technical conference was enough to send shockwaves 4,400 miles back to Amsterdam, as the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) announced that AV2—the successor to the AV1 video codec—will be finalized by the end of this year. With AV2 aiming for approximately 40% lower bandwidth than AV1 at the same perceptual quality, AOM has heralded the younger brother codec as a the “answer to the world’s growing streaming demands.” Even by the egotistical standards of AOM’s founders (Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Mozilla, Netflix, Cisco), to describe AV2…