Video codecs are a perennial point of contention, but critical to many mobile and broadband applications – and years of battles over the main candidates have always threatened fragmentation of effort, especially between the two main contenders, the MPEG-backed HEVC, and its successor Versatile Video Coding (VVC); and Google-supported AV1. A recent tidbit of information suggests that HEVC might have just leapfrogged AV1, say analysts at Wireless Watch’s sister service, Faultline, which provides weekly analysis of the digital video market. The irony here is that Google, the single largest proponent of AV1, might have signed the alt-codec’s death warrant, by finally enabling HEVC inside Chrome. The clue here is a website called CanIUse, brought to our attention by Jan Ozer,…