AOMedia Video 1

AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium of firms from the semiconductor industry, video on demand providers, video content producers, software development companies and web browser vendors, founded in 2015. The AV1 bitstream specification includes a reference video codec. It succeeds VP9. It can have 20% higher data compression than VP9 or HEVC/H.265 from the Moving Picture Experts Group and about 50% higher than the widely used AVC. AV1 was announced with the creation of the Alliance for Open Media on 1 September 2015.This was to combine its members' technology and expertise to create a better royalty-free video format with qualities that are, in short, suitable for web use.In particular, Google, Mozilla and Cisco already had ongoing research projects into royalty-free video at this time, namely VP10, Daala and Thor. The timely announcement of AV1 was welcomed by industry observers as an escape hatch from the licensing of HEVC;the first sign that HEVC pricing was going to be in a different ballpark than AVC had come with HEVC Advance's initial licensing offer on 21 July 2015, 42 days before.Cisco's Thor development was started in response to HEVC being perceived as unviable for use in open source and freely distributed products,but the work of Google and Mozilla (previously under Xiph) on royalty-free video predates this event (by a decade in Xiph's case),and is not attributable to HEVC's licensing woes, although it definitely also is seen as a problem by Mozilla. AV1 is intended for use in HTML5 web video and WebRTC together with the Opus audio format. The official announcement of AV1 came with the press release on the formation of the Alliance for Open Media on 1 September 2015. The Alliance's seven founding members – Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix – announced that the initial focus of the video format would be delivery of high-quality web video. The Alliance's motivations for creating AV1 included the high cost and uncertainty involved with the patent licensing of HEVC, the MPEG-designed codec expected to succeed AVC. With previous MPEG standards, the technology in the standard could be licensed from a single entity – MPEG-LA – but two years after the HEVC standard was finished, two patent pools had been formed with a third one on its way. In addition, various patent holders weren't offering patents via either pool, increasing uncertainty about HEVC's licensing. According to Microsoft's Ian LeGrow, an open-source, royalty-free technology was seen as the easiest way to eliminate this uncertainty around licensing. The negative effect of patent licensing on free and open-source software has also been cited as a reason for the creation of AV1. For example, building a H.264 implementation into Firefox would prevent it from being distributed free of charge since licensing fees would have to be paid to MPEG-LA. Free Software Foundation Europe has argued that FRAND patent licensing practices make the free software implementation of standards impossible due to various incompatibilities with free software licenses. The increased usage of AV1's predecessor VP9 is also attributed to confidence in the Alliance and development of AV1. The roots of the project precede the Alliance. Individual contributors started experimental technology platforms years before: Xiph's/Mozilla's Daala already published code in 2010, Google's experimental VP9 evolution project VP10 was announced on 12 September 2014, and Cisco's Thor was published on 11 August 2015. Building on the codebase of VP9, AV1 incorporates additional techniques, several of which were developed in these experimental formats.The first version 0.1.0 of the AV1 reference codec was published on 7 April 2016.