h267 is still in development and due to be released in 2028. That's the actual competitor with AV2.
So I guess neither of these line up 1:1. I tend to see h265 and AV1 competing pretty hard right now so I tend to think of those as one generation and presumably h266 and AV2 will compete as the next generation.
AV1 and VP9/VP8 before that have, in contrast, been pretty much static after they were released. AV1 has had a single errata after it's release.
So I could see why you'd see H265 as the competitor. I mostly don't simply because I believe they explicitly stated that they were trying to be competitive with 266.
I personally prefer the way AOMedia is running things and I suspect hardware manufacturers do as well. No licenses and AOM is creating open source reference encoders/decoders. They are working very hard to make it easy for manufacturers to be able to pick up the spec and run with it. Keeping the stream standard static for a long period also means manufacturers don't have to worry that they won't get a new extension next year. Content encoders are also reasonably guaranteed that their encoding with today's software still works with yesteryear hardware.
MPEG, on the other hand, is paywalling the crap out of everything.
That is some major revisionist history.
AV1 was created to suck all the oxygen out of the room for h265, and hopefully be finished soon enough that most chipsets would implement AV1 instead of h265, because no one would want to pay the royalty fees. This would then be a major boon to Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix and Amazon. Only Apple had vested interest in h265.
Instead, h265 was finished very fast and Apple almost immediately implemented it on their iPhone chipsets, with their end goal being much smaller video recording sizes at high resolution and FPS. Then Intel added h265 decode to Quick Sync. This was the nail in the coffin for AV1. AV1 is only now seeing some limited uptake.
Hopefully AV2 can have its bitstream / spec frozen in time and garner hardware support before h266 does, otherwise the AV codecs will be forever niche because the MPEG group will always have the lead in hardware decode.
