Creating a codec for tomorrow’s content

Formed three years ago at IBC15 mainly because of uncertainty over HEVC licensing, The Alliance for Open Media (AOM) has an awesome governing membership of Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, and Nvidia.

Its other 24 members include Adobe, Ateme, BBC R&D, Bitmovin, Hulu, and VideoLAN. Its newest member is the giant Chinese online site iQiyi, which has some 500 million active monthly users.

Its AV1 codec was conceived as an open-source, royalty-free technology for delivering online video content, which could offer 30% plus quality gains over VP9 and HEVC.

The AOM, backed by first AV1 codec implementations from Ateme, Bitmovin, Google, Mozilla, NGCodec, Socionext and Video LAN, made a huge practical impact on IBC, also gaining several major corporate plugs in the IBC conference sessions.

With so much to report in terms of AV1 impact it may have taken some by surprise when AOM board spokesman Matt Frost, Director of Product Management with Google, said: “Work has already started on AV2. We had to leave some tools on the table just because there was work coming in we did not have time to integrate in AV1. Those will go into the next generation codec.

“The way we talk about implementations is that the AV1 standard is actually not a piece of software,” he added. “It is a written description of how you decode the AV1 bit stream. The big thing about a royalty free and open source codec is that you know what the terms are from the beginning.”

AOM has the core ambition of expanding the network and is mindful of…