That reminds me of the old, hilariously broken ffmpeg AAC encoder where increasing the bitrate decreased the quality after a certain point, at least in my tests. So although my guess at what would be causing weird stuff like this would certainly be bad testing methodology by BBC rather than a quirk in the encoder, there's a non-zero chance that I'd be wrong.
However, I think libaom performance was the deciding factor for this. They say right there that they chose this arrangement because it would allow them to deliver 10s chunks with reasonable latency.
With SVT-AV1 and appropriate hardware, there's no reason they couldn't do 10s like they should, and in that case AV1 would probably shine.
Twitch (and others) is looking into optimizing for live steaming. A good comment with links from last year:
Twitch (and others) is looking into optimizing for live steaming. A good comment with links from last year:
1) AV1 has significant advantages in its inter compression vs HM. AV1 also has explicit tools for dealing with short GOPs that where not tested. See: https://jmvalin.ca/papers/AV1_tools.pdf for inter prediction.
2) AV1 and HM both have a different set of tools for intra prediction and as such different coding efficiency on key frames.
3) Yeah and two second gops are really bad for video quality. 4-6s is far more common except on latency sensitive applications.
I'll also point out that the reported MOS scores have several oddities, like an 8mbps av1 stream being rates lower than it's own 6mbps stream.