Canada’s NetInt Technologies has announced what it claims is the first hardware AV1 encoder design to be commercially available. The ASIC is looking to tap nascent demand for AOMedia’s next-gen codec, but market scepticism over the status licensing of AV1 remains. The arrival of Sisvel, an intellectual property management firm, into the AV1 patent equation put the kibosh on the idea that AV1 would be completely royalty-free, despite the lamentations of AOMedia. We have covered Qualcomm’s lack of interest in the codec too, while LCEVC developer V-Nova has been a strong critic of the royalty-free badging, and it seems that AV1 has properly succumbed to the royalty wars, despite the intentions of its backers. Looking back to HEVC (H.265), we…