The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is a non-profit industry consortium headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts and formed to develop open, royalty-free technology for multimedia delivery. It uses the ideas and principles of open web standard development to create video standards that can serve as alternatives to the hitherto dominant standards of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).
Its first project was to develop AV1, a new open video codec and format, as a successor to VP9 and an alternative to HEVC. AV1 uses elements from Daala, Thor, and VP10, three preceding open video codecs.
The governing members of the Alliance for Open Media are Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent.
History
Some collaboration and work that would later be merged into AV1 predates the official launch of the Alliance.
Following the successful standardization of an audio standard in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 2012, a working group for the standardization of a royalty-free video format began to form under the lead of members of the Xiph.org Foundation, who had begun working on their experimental video format Daala back in 2010. In May 2015, the Internet Video Codec working group (NetVC) of the IETF was officially started and presented with coding techniques from Daala. Cisco Systems joined forces and offered their own prototype format Thor to the working group on July 22.
The lack of a suitable video format for inclusion in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s HTML5 specification and the failed negotiations for one mandatory video format for WebRTC showed the need for a competitive, open video standard.
The emergence of a second patent pool for HEVC (HEVC Advance) in spring 2015 provided motivation for investments in an alternative video format and grew support for the Alliance, mainly due to the uncertainty regarding royalties for MPEG's next-generation video format, HEVC.
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 licensed formats such as H.264 and HEVC. The founding members are Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix. The plan was to release the video format by 2017.
The alliance saw expansion of its member list since inception. On April 5, 2016, the Alliance for Open Media announced that AMD, ARM, and Nvidia had joined, and Adobe, Ateme, Ittiam and Vidyo joined in the months following. On November 13, 2017, Facebook later joined as a governing member. In January 2018 the alliance's website was quietly updated to add Apple as a governing member of the alliance. On April 3, 2019, Samsung Electronics joined as a governing member. October 1, 2019, Tencent joined as a governing member.
In 2018, the founder and chairman of the MPEG acknowledged the Alliance to be the biggest threat to their business model, furthermore stating that:
2022
Articles suggested that Google was in planning to release 2 open formats, High-dynamic-range video/HDR video and 3D audio, as alternatives to Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision video technology. A draft called IAC has been developed for audio, and Samsung's HDR10+ will not be utilized. During September 2022, AOMedia announced Project Caviar. Although the name is yet to be disclosed, the announcement was made public through a journal authored by AOMedia developers and biographies shared on the doc: and after a month papers calls were released with an early draft. The Video Codec Working Group (CWG) was the first AOMedia technical group. Recognizing some needs, AOMedia created, in February 2022, the Volumetric Visual Media Working Group (VVMWG). In June 2022, 10 universities and 24 organizations (companies) went to Alliance for Open Media Symposium, with various engineers working on AV1 and developing the new technologies in the cwg incubators gains test for the Next Generation AOM standard. There are in the alliance efforts done through different working groups. AVM: AOM Video Model - was created in the AOMedia GitLab repository. It consists of tools based on research candidate. AVM is the software codebase that AOMedia is using for its research and development of the next generation video coding technologies. The development happens in stages, and each new anchor is the codebase in which previously adopted experiments have been integrated and which is used in the following round of the experiments. - this repo based on Libaom, reference encoder for AV1 format.
2023
During June 2023, AOMedia announced that Zoom Video Communications would become a promoter member.