>And so hardware decoding may ether be (a) impossible on current devices or (b) likely to destroy battery life.
The development of the codec has been done with constant input from the hardware developers who are backing AV1 (Intel,AMD,Broadcom,NVidia etc) in order to make it effective when used with hardware acceleration. Just watch some of the developer presentations on Youtube.
Your fear that all the streaming and hardware giants would cooperately develop a codec that won't be effective on mobile hardware is unfounded.
The development of the codec has been done with constant input from the hardware developers who are backing AV1 (Intel,AMD,Broadcom,NVidia etc) in order to make it effective when used with hardware acceleration. Just watch some of the developer presentations on Youtube.
Your fear that all the streaming and hardware giants would cooperately develop a codec that won't be effective on mobile hardware is unfounded.