You kind of ignore the case where almost every device is going to do AV1 hardware decoding (which very much appears to be the trend), if that is significantly f

You kind of ignore the case where almost every device is going to do AV1 hardware decoding (which very much appears to be the trend), if that is significantly faster/cheaper battery wise then AV1 still has a big advantage. Comparing single-core software decoding speed seems like a benchmark designed to make JXL look good, not something that actually matters. > AVIF reduces the amount of traffic required, but will tend to consume more power. This is the general compression tradeoff. Again, you seem to be ignoring hardware decoding. Dedicated silicon can be many magnitudes more efficient than doing something in software. To take an extreme example with a ton of effort into the efficiency: look at mining bitcoin on a CPU vs an ASIC. I'm not saying the difference will be that big, but it may well be worthwhile. As to buggy/too much effort/cost of hardware, that's precisely why it makes sense to piggy-back on AV1, a format that already has a lot of incentive to implement in hardware, and the work already done to make it work well. You need that kind of compression for video, and people are putting in the effort to make it work well, so AVIF gets that effectively for free.