Streaming giant Netflix has announced that it is beginning to stream video using AV1 on Android to save users cellular data.

AV1 is a high performance, royalty-free video codec that provides 20 per cent improved compression efficiency over our VP9 encodes.

AV1 is designed primarily for encoding content for the internet and it is backed by multiple high profile companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and more.

According to company, selected titles are now available to stream in AV1 for customers who wish to reduce their cellular data usage by enabling the "Save Data" feature.

"Our support for AV1 represents Netflix's continued investment in delivering the most efficient and highest quality video streams. For our mobile environment, AV1 follows on our work with VP9, which we released as part of our mobile encodes in 2016 and further optimized with shot-based encodes in 2018," the company said in a statement recently.

The main advantage of AV1, is that it is also more efficient than other codecs on the market today.

As of yet, a wider rollout of AV1 is not possible due to limited software and hardware support, but in the future, Netflix has plans to make AV1 the default codec on all of its platforms.

Recently, Netflix lost a whopping over 1.1 million subscribers to Disney Plus.

According to a poll conducted by analytics firm Cowen & Co. 24 million people in the US subscribed to Disney Plus since its launch, while 5.8 per cent of Netflix users cancelled their subscriptions to make the switch.

As per the survey, 21 per cent of the total respondents said they signed up for Disney Plus in November, suggesting the 24 million customer base exiting the month, Variety reported recently.

The estimates come from the research team at Cowen & Co., based on a census-weighted survey of 2,500 US consumers conducted last month.