Isn't It Time for AVIF Everywhere?

Rising storage costs and hosting prices, which Michael Mitchell links partly to hardware shortages and demand from the AI boom, motivate a call for broader adoption of efficient media formats. He argues that AVIF can deliver image quality comparable to WebP with better compression, reducing the storage and bandwidth needed for the vast volume of images shared online. WebP remains a reasonable fallback, but he wants social platforms, hosting services, and websites to support AVIF rather than convert uploaded files into less efficient formats. Asking users to encode images on their own devices could also limit processing demands on providers, though services would still need to generate thumbnails and handle compatibility.

Mitchell points to YouTube’s planned move toward AV2 after AV1 as evidence that large-scale services recognize the value of more efficient formats. He says wider adoption would not end hardware shortages or reverse price increases, but could help independent sites and smaller providers use resources more effectively and make pages load faster. He also urges phone makers to support AVIF capture and storage, alongside Apple’s HEIC, to reduce the need for repeated conversions across devices and services. In the comments, readers dispute whether storage is truly scarce or expensive, noting that inexpensive hard drives can hold large media collections. Mitchell responds that prices and availability vary by provider and user, while emphasizing that his central case is for efficient formats, not a claim that compression solves the hardware problem.