Taking the best part of 19 months to expand AV1 support from select titles on Android mobile devices to select TV sets, as Netflix has just done, is not the greatest advertisement for the Alliance for Open Media-backed video compression technology. This is of course a hardware issue, with AV1 hardware decoders taking significantly longer to develop than the software decoders which have enabled Android handset users to stream Netflix at reduced mobile data rates. In all fairness to Netflix, the SVoD titan has explained the long wait in great detail, citing four core technical challenges in bringing AV1 support from palm of hand to living room wall. Figuring out the best AV1 encoding recipe for Netflix streaming was challenge…