Notes from the cutting room — streaming craft, encoding, and the future of adult cinema.

Why we rebuilt our entire playback stack around AV1 — and what it means for adult streaming in 2026.

After eighteen months of A/B testing across 4.2 million sessions, our engineering team finally flipped the default codec to AV1. The numbers are dramatic: a 41% reduction in bandwidth at perceptual parity, lower mobile data costs for viewers in emerging markets, and a clear bump in completion rates. Here's the full postmortem, the failures, and the wins.