Abbreviation AOMedia, AOM | Products AOMedia Video | |
Formation September 1, 2015 (2015-09-01) Founders Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix Purpose Develop a royalty-free video format Headquarters Wakefield, Massachusetts | ||
The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is a non-profit organization whose first project is to develop a new open video codec and format as a successor to VP9 and a royalty-free alternative to HEVC. The founding members are Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix. The collaboration goal for the future of this joint development foundation is to "avoid more patent and licensing battles that have been a big roadblock to innovation." The alliance also aims to provide competition to the Moving Picture Experts Group, who provide backing for the video data compression methods most commonly in use in 2015. The project will release new video codecs as free software under the BSD 2-Clause License and will use elements from Daala, Thor, and VP10.
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History
On September 1, 2015, the Alliance for Open Media was announced with the goal of developing a royalty free video format as an alternative to e.g. the licensed H.264 and HEVC. The plan is to release the video format by 2017.
On April 5, 2016, the Alliance for Open Media announced that AMD, ARM, and NVIDIA had joined. Adobe, Ateme, Ittiam & Vidyo joined in the months following.
AOMedia Video
The Alliance's main goal is to create and deliver next-generation state of the art open video compression formats and codecs that are optimized for streaming media over the internet, for both commercial and non-commercial content, including user-generated content. A line of new video formats named AOMedia Video (AV) is being developed. Alliance members from the chip industry (AMD, ARM, Intel, Nvidia) are meant to ensure hardware-friendly design.
AOMedia is planning for the first version of its format (AV1) to be completed by March 2017. It is assumed to get rapid adoption and is the primary contender for standardisation by the video coding standard working group NetVC of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Main distinguishing features of AV1 are its royalty-free licensing terms and state of the art performance. AV1 is specifically designed for real-time applications and for higher resolutions than typical usage scenarios of the current generation (H.264) of video formats.