To be honest, I was surprised to see Netflix backing the Intel-SVT encoder while there is still active development happening at https://aomedia.googlesource.com/aom/+log. From the looks of the commit logs, Google might still be behind the reference libaom encoder. This sounds a bit like the start of encoder fragmentation in AV1 space with two heavyweights of online streaming going splitting their development efforts on different encoders.

Wouldn’t it be better if the consortium put all their developmental effort into one encoder so that speed & quality gains can be achieved sooner?