Dolby vs Snapchat Just Validated MX Player's Weirdest Tech Bet

In 2021, MX Player did something the streaming industry called premature, niche, and slightly absurd: it became the first OTT platform on the planet to deploy H.266/VVC.
 

Act I: The Bet That Made No Sense (2021)

Most of the streaming industry treated VVC like a slow-cooking research project.

No phone shipped with hardware decoders, licensing pools were unfinished, and the encoder ecosystem was barely past reference implementations.

MX Player flipped the switch anyway.

With more than 200 million active users on the MX Player Android app, it deployed H.266 in software, built its own encoder, licensed the decoder from Tencent, and began routing VVC streams to up to 20% of its installed base.

The argument at the time was strictly regional. Indian users live on capped daily data, and a 25-minute HD video dropping from 165MB on HEVC to roughly 52MB on VVC was the difference between two episodes and five.

Outside India, nobody followed. Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime stayed on HEVC and AV1.

Industry coverage politely dismissed MX Player's move as a niche experiment that would eventually fold back into mainstream codec choices.

Act II: The Obituary (December 2025)

By late 2025, the smart money on next-gen codecs had completely shifted to AV1.

Rethink Research published its 2025-2030 codec forecast, and senior analyst Alex Davies delivered the eulogy: VVC was, in his words, "essentially dead on arrival".
 

His reasoning was clean. Mobile and fixed-line bandwidth had grown faster than expected. Software decoding on modern phones was eating most of the codec efficiency advantage. There was, he wrote, "no commercial pull for VVC from the market".

AV1 - royalty-free, backed by Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, and Samsung - looked unstoppable.

YouTube was already encoding 75% of its library in AV1.

Netflix was running AV1 on roughly 30% of its traffic. Snapchat had quietly built AV1 into its video pipeline.

The narrative was decided. AV1 had won. VVC was a footnote. MX Player's bet looked, in hindsight, like a regional curiosity.

Act III: Dolby vs Snapchat (March 23, 2026)

On a Monday night in late March 2026, Dolby Laboratories filed patent infringement complaints against Snap Inc. in Delaware federal court and in Rio de Janeiro state court. The patents-in-suit covered HEVC and - here is the bombshell - AV1.

It was the first time an Access Advance licensor had filed a patent assertion against an AV1 implementation. It was also the first AV1 patent assertion against any streaming platform.
 

Dolby's argument is brutal in its simplicity. The AV1 specification was finalized after many foundational video coding patents had already been filed.

Because AV1 and HEVC share similar block-based coding techniques, Dolby's patented methods ended up inside AV1 - without Dolby's involvement, donation, or consent.

Access Advance CEO Peter Moller put the principle on record: labeling a codec "royalty-free" does not eliminate the underlying patent rights of every party who never agreed to that label.

The New Math

The Dolby case detonated something that had been quietly building for two years.

Nokia and InterDigital already had AV1 enforcement actions in motion. Sisvel had quietly opened its own AV1 patent pool. Access Advance now administered roughly 4,500 essential VVC patents in a single, structured pool.

Suddenly the three-codec landscape looked very different from how it looked in December 2025:

• HEVC - mature, dominant, but still mired in the licensing chaos that made everyone want AV1 in the first place.
• AV1 - "royalty-free" in marketing, but apparently not actually royalty-free in court. Patent risk is now public, with willful infringement theories on the table.
• VVC - declared dead three months earlier, now the only one of the three with a structured single-pool licensing path through Access Advance, plus DVB inclusion, Intel Lunar Lake hardware decode, and MediaTek Pentonic chip support already shipping.

Florian Mueller, an intellectual property analyst, told Ars Technica that the AV1 risk profile may now be larger than HEVC's, because far more patent holders sit outside the AV1 royalty-free pledge with no FRAND obligations holding them in check. In theory, those holders can demand whatever they want.

Why MX Player Suddenly Looks Strategic

Amazon acquired MX Player in June 2024 for under $100M, well below its peak $500M valuation. The deal was framed publicly as an Indian market grab.
 

But Amazon now owns the only operational, at-scale, real-world VVC streaming deployment on the planet. It owns the encoder. It owns the playback experience.

And it owns the institutional knowledge of how to roll a "dead" codec out to a real user base over four years.

If software VVC playback works on Indian Android hardware while cutting CDN costs by 50%, the same playbook can travel to other Prime markets - and now it travels with structured, defensible licensing through Access Advance, while AV1 deployments face a growing patent fight.

Dolby's parallel acquisition of GE's video codec licensing portfolio in June 2024 starts to read differently in this light.

So does the steady drip of VVC encoder progress through tools like the open-source uvg266 VVC encoder, Fraunhofer's VVenC, and MainConcept's live VVC encoder used in the Paris Olympics trials.

What Comes Next

Snap has three exits. Negotiate a license through Access Advance's Video Distribution Pool. Fight Dolby in court and win. Or rip AV1 out of Snapchat entirely and fall back to HEVC and VP9.

None of those exits help AV1's broader narrative. A Roku-style settlement signals that "royalty-free" is contingent. A court loss is worse. A retreat from AV1 by a 7-million-DAU video platform is worse still.

Meanwhile, AV2 - AOMedia's planned successor - is expected by the end of 2025 with the same royalty-free pitch. Dolby's lawsuit just hung a question mark on that pitch the size of a freight container.

This does not mean VVC wins. Most major streaming services will still run HEVC and AV1 well into 2027. Browser support for VVC is essentially nonexistent. Encoding is computationally expensive. The codec war is still wide open.

But the next time someone calls a streaming platform's codec choice "weird," it might be worth waiting five years before laughing.

For more on the lawsuit driving the new uncertainty, read our deeper coverage of Dolby's AV1 patent suit against Snap, or check the practical Android side with the guide on getting AV1 codec working on Android.