Many things that used to be h.264 are now using h.265 (hevc). Without this license a lot of applications can't play hevc at all, they rely on the codecs included in windows (which are unavailable without a license). They either fall back to another codec, or stop working. The article mentioned issues with videos playback in browsers and issues with ms teams.

Applications like ffmpeg or VLC still work, but using them on a PC without a hevc license is probably illegal.

Video calls and some live streamings. Steam Remote Play (together), Sunshine/Moonlight and Parsec for gaming where you can easily check the client's capabilities and go with whatever is best. Discord also does similar for video calls I believe. Steams newer game recording feature also only supports h264/h265 with no AV1 support.

It's not that relevant for video conferencing, most apps are still either doing H264, VP8 or VP9 and jumping to AV1 directly.

And for video streaming, AV1 is becoming increasingly used on Youtube and Netflix for example ( https://aomedia.org/av1-adoption-showcase/netflix-story/ )/.

It is used a lot more for people who don't have to worry too much about licensing at scale, such as pirate content or local streaming (quite often backed by an OS wide license). Doing a quick search on various pirate content search engine, I can see a lot of AV1 content now, so it'll eventually get more popular!

I don't know about you, but I have a large selection of 10 bit HEVC movies and series on my system, and hardware decoding for this is pretty nice. Apart from that, videos taken on apple devices use HEVC by default last time I checked. But in the end, it's still not that important probably, doesn't mean that it shouldn't be available/accessible

HEVC is pretty much a straight improvement over h264. Same quality, much smaller file sizes, and it's actually got HW decode supported in most integrated GPUs unlike av1. I've been converting all my h264 stuff, saves a lot of space on my disks.

You can also go with VP9 which is pretty much on par with HEVC

If you’re watching streaming content in 4K, most of that is streamed in HEVC. Also, any phones that record video typically do so in HEVC by default.

Not sure on computers, but video recorded with your phone camera is probably using HEVC.

And while phones usually have a hardware AV1 decoder, they probably don't have an AV1 encoder.

For recording video on phones, there is h.264, and the relatively newer, better option HEVC.

Thus much of peoples' photo library is becoming HEVC.