The AV1 video compression format is developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) industry consortium, and achieves more than a 30% reduction in bit rate compared to its predecessor VP9 for the same decoded video quality. However, the encoder complexity of AV1 is much higher than VP9. In this paper, we discussed the optimization technologies used to reduce AV1 encoder complexity to the complexity level of VP9 encoder while still achieving 22% bit rate savings. The optimized libaom AV1 encoder offers a superb solution for video-on-demand (VOD) applications, reducing the encoding cost and generating huge bandwidth and storage savings.