AV1 is an emerging open-source and royalty-free video compression format, which is jointly developed and finalized in early 2018 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) industry consortium. The main goal of the AV1 codec is to reduce the video's bit rate while maintaining the quality. Due to this, higher quality videos such as 4K and 8K can be uploaded to the internet without degradation in the quality. AV1 offers better compression than previous encoding standards at the same bit rate. This increased compression efficiency enables smoother playback on lower bandwidths for both high and low resolutions. This paper provides a brief technical overview of key coding techniques in AV1 codec along with some results of the performance evaluation of AV1 compared to HEVC