As hardware decoding support for VP9 reaches ubiquity, notably on mobile devices, Meta is planning to move the minimum codec requirement from AVC to VP9 during the next year, leaving AVC for only legacy support. Meta’s Technical Program Manager, Hassene Tmar, revealed the roadmap during a panel session at the Streaming Media Connect virtual conference. “We already see AV1 picking up a lot of watch time,” Tmar said, adding that more than 70% of Meta’s watch time on iOS is already on AV1, and growing. AV1 is also poised to enable better video quality in countries with lower bandwidth. iOS devices currently without VP9 hardware support can still decode content in software, Tmar noted, while recent support in Google Chromecast…