The Alliance for Open Media has launched it's first video codec in early 2018 and it gained lot's of traction ever since. Alongside the ever developing software encoders which are built by AOM members there were also changes in the internet noticeable for everyone:
video/av1
AV1 is not only immensly more efficient than the mainstream H.264/AVC which has been the norm for over a decade, it also surpasses more recent popular codecs like VP9 and H.265/HEVC.
But most importantly, AV1, contrary to HEVC, is free and open-source. It's royality-free nature enables every provider and every device to support the codec without paying AOMedia a cent. This is key to get wide ranging support and drive adoption.
In contrary HEVC requires expensive licensing royalities to use as a company and it's IPs are a mess.