Alliance for Open Media

Last updated

Alliance for Open Media
AbbreviationAOMedia, AOM
FormationSeptember 1, 2015;8 years ago (2015-09-01)
Founder Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix [1]
Type Industry consortium
PurposeDevelopment of a royalty-free video format
Headquarters Wakefield, Massachusetts, U.S.
Products
Members (2021)
53
Parent organization
Joint Development Foundation
Website aomedia.org

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). [2] [3] [4]

Contents

Its first project was to develop AV1, a new open video codec and format, as a successor to VP9 and an alternative to HEVC. [1] 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. [2]

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, [5] who had begun working on their experimental video format Daala back in 2010. [6] In May 2015, the Internet Video Codec working group (NetVC) of the IETF was officially started and presented with coding techniques from Daala. [7] Cisco Systems joined forces and offered their own prototype format Thor to the working group on July 22. [8]

The lack of a suitable video format for inclusion in the specification of HTML video by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [9] 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. [10]

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. [11] [1] The founding members are Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix. [1] The plan was to release the video format by 2017. [1] [12]

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. [13] In January 2018 the alliance's website was quietly updated to add Apple as a governing member of the alliance. [14] On April 3, 2019, Samsung Electronics joined as a governing member. [15] October 1, 2019, Tencent joined as a governing member. [16]

In 2018, the founder and chairman of the MPEG acknowledged the Alliance to be the biggest threat to their business model, furthermore stating that: [17]

Alliance for Open Media has occupied the void created by MPEG’s outdated video compression standard (AVC), absence of competitive [royalty free] standards (IVC) and unusable modern standard (HEVC)... Everybody realises that the old MPEG business model is now broke.

—  Leonardo Chiariglione, A crisis, the causes and a solution

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. [18] 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. [19] 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, [20] 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. [21] 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. [22] [23] [24] - this repo based on Libaom, reference encoder for AV1 format. [25]

2023

During June 2023, AOMedia announced that Zoom Video Communications would become a promoter member. [26]

AOMedia Video

AOMedia's first project was the creation of an open video compression format and codec optimized for streaming media over the internet, intended for both commercial and non-commercial content, including user-generated content. The format is intended to be the first in a line of new, AOMedia Video (AV) formats being developed. [27]

AOMedia planned for the first version of its format (AV1) to be completed before the end of 2017. [28] However, work on the bitstream specification will be continued into 2018. [29] The format is the primary contender for standardisation by the video coding standard working group NetVC of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). [30]

The main distinguishing features of AV1 are its purported royalty-free licensing terms and 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. [31]

In 2019, Sisvel International formed a patent pool for selling licenses to intellectual property it anticipates will be necessary to comply with the AV1 standard. AOMedia said this was contrary to its goal of a standard developed entirely with free, donated technology owned by the organization. Sisvel anticipates AV1 will require patented technology developed outside the AOMedia member organizations. [32]

Operation and structure

The Alliance is incorporated in the US as a tax-exempt non-profit organization and a subsidiary "project" of the independent Joint Development Foundation (JDF), also headquartered in Wakefield.

The Alliance intends to release new video codecs as free software under the BSD 2-Clause License. It adopted the patent rules of the W3C [3] which mandate technology contributors to disclose all patents that may be relevant and to agree to a royalty-free patent license. [33] The Alliance's patent license contains a defensive termination clause to discourage patent lawsuits.

Software development happens in the open [27] using a public source code repository [31] and issue tracking system, and welcomes contributions from the general public. Contributions have to pass internal reviews and gain consensus for their adoption. Different sub-groups inside the Alliance handle testing, [34] reviews for IPR/patent problems [3] [34] hardware-friendliness, [34] and editing of specification documents. [35]

There are two levels of membership: organizations can join as an ordinary member, or as a governing member with a seat on the board of directors. Confusingly, these are dubbed "founding members" in AOM terminology, although they need not be members since the Alliance was founded.

There is a broad representation of the video industry among the Alliance members, featuring several hardware, software, and content producers, OTT video distributors, providers of real-time conferencing solutions, and browser vendors. Several AOM members have previously worked on MPEG's HEVC and hold patents to it (e.g. BBC, Intel, Cisco, Vidyo, Apple, Microsoft, and Broadcom [36] ).

Governing members

As of November 2021: [37]

General members

As of November 2023: [37]

Previous members

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Video codec</span> Digital video processing

A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, codec is a portmanteau of encoder and decoder, while a device that only compresses is typically called an encoder, and one that only decompresses is a decoder.

Dirac is an open and royalty-free video compression format, specification and software video codec developed by BBC Research & Development. Dirac aimed to provide high-quality video compression for Ultra HDTV and competed with existing formats such as H.264.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FFmpeg</span> Multimedia framework

FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of video and audio files. It is widely used for format transcoding, basic editing, video scaling, video post-production effects and standards compliance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Advanced Video Coding</span> Most widely used standard for video compression

Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distribution of video content, used by 91% of video industry developers as of September 2019. It supports a maximum resolution of 8K UHD.

These tables compare features of multimedia container formats, most often used for storing or streaming digital video or digital audio content. To see which multimedia players support which container format, look at comparison of media players.

MPEG LA was an American company based in Denver, Colorado that licensed patent pools covering essential patents required for use of the MPEG-2, MPEG-4, IEEE 1394, VC-1, ATSC, MVC, MPEG-2 Systems, AVC/H.264 and HEVC standards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VP8</span> Open and royalty-free video coding format released by Google in 2010

VP8 is an open and royalty-free video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008.

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding. In comparison to AVC, HEVC offers from 25% to 50% better data compression at the same level of video quality, or substantially improved video quality at the same bit rate. It supports resolutions up to 8192×4320, including 8K UHD, and unlike the primarily 8-bit AVC, HEVC's higher fidelity Main 10 profile has been incorporated into nearly all supporting hardware.

The HTML5 specification introduced the video element for the purpose of playing videos, partially replacing the object element. HTML5 video is intended by its creators to become the new standard way to show video on the web, instead of the previous de facto standard of using the proprietary Adobe Flash plugin, though early adoption was hampered by lack of agreement as to which video coding formats and audio coding formats should be supported in web browsers. As of 2020, HTML5 video is the only widely supported video playback technology in modern browsers, with the Flash plugin being phased out.

A video coding format is a content representation format of digital video content, such as in a data file or bitstream. It typically uses a standardized video compression algorithm, most commonly based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) coding and motion compensation. A specific software, firmware, or hardware implementation capable of compression or decompression in a specific video coding format is called a video codec.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VP9</span> Open and royalty-free video coding format released by Google in 2013

VP9 is an open and royalty-free video coding format developed by Google.

Daala is a video coding format under development by the Xiph.Org Foundation under the lead of Timothy B. Terriberry mainly sponsored by the Mozilla Corporation. Like Theora and Opus, Daala is available free of any royalties and its reference implementation is being developed as free and open-source software. The name is taken from the fictional character of Admiral Natasi Daala from the Star Wars universe.

NETVC was the name given to a planned royalty-free video codec that was intended to be developed in the former Internet Video Codec working group of the IETF. It was intended to provide a royalty-free alternative to industry standards such as H.264/AVC and HEVC that have required licensing payments for many uses. The chairs of the working group were Matthew Miller of Outer Planes and Mo Zanaty of Cisco. A list of criteria to be met by the new video standard was produced in April 2020 as Informational RFC 8761, and the working group was closed.

Thor is a royalty-free video codec under development by Cisco Systems. The specifications of Thor were available in various Internet Drafts.

High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) is a container format for storing individual digital images and image sequences. The standard covers multimedia files that can also include other media streams, such as timed text, audio and video.

AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 that includes semiconductor firms, video on demand providers, video content producers, software development companies and web browser vendors. The AV1 bitstream specification includes a reference video codec. In 2018, Facebook conducted testing that approximated real-world conditions, and the AV1 reference encoder achieved 34%, 46.2%, and 50.3% higher data compression than libvpx-vp9, x264 High profile, and x264 Main profile respectively.

Internet Video Coding is a video coding standard. IVC was created by MPEG, and was intended to be a royalty-free video coding standard for use on the Internet, as an alternative to non-free formats such as AVC and HEVC. As such, IVC was designed to only use coding techniques which were not covered by royalty-requiring patents.

Versatile Video Coding (VVC), also known as H.266, ISO/IEC 23090-3, and MPEG-I Part 3, is a video compression standard finalized on 6 July 2020, by the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET), a joint video expert team of the VCEG working group of ITU-T Study Group 16 and the MPEG working group of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29. It is the successor to High Efficiency Video Coding. It was developed with two primary goals – improved compression performance and support for a very broad range of applications.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Stephen Shankland (September 1, 2015). "Tech giants join forces to hasten high-quality online video". CNET . Retrieved September 1, 2015.
  2. 1 2 Bright, Peter (September 1, 2015). "Microsoft, Google, Amazon, others, aim for royalty-free video codecs". Ars Technica. Retrieved March 17, 2018.
  3. 1 2 3 Bhartiya, Swapnil (September 2, 2015). "Open source, open standard, royalty-free media codecs? That's the promise of the newly formed Alliance for Open Media". CIO. IDG Communications, Inc. Retrieved March 17, 2018.[ permanent dead link ]
  4. ↑ Lamm, Greg (September 3, 2015). "Why Microsoft and Amazon are working with Google and Netflix to make video streaming faster". American City Business Journals .
  5. ↑ "NETVC (Canceled) – BOF meeting proposals for IETF 91". trac.tools.ietf.org. January 20, 2015. Archived from the original on February 22, 2016. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  6. ↑ "Initial import of Timothy Terriberry's daala-exp code". GitHub. October 13, 2010. Retrieved August 1, 2015.
  7. ↑ Armasu, Lucian (March 25, 2015). "IETF Begins Standardization Process For Next-Generation 'NETVC' Video Codec (Daala)". Tom's Hardware . Retrieved August 5, 2015.
  8. ↑ "NETVC IETF 93 minutes". ietf.org. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  9. ↑ Krill, Paul (August 19, 2015). "Cisco's Thor project swings a hammer at Web video codecs". InfoWorld. IDG Communications, Inc. Retrieved March 17, 2018.
  10. ↑ Pozdnyakov, Andrey. "AOM AV1 vs. HEVC". elecard.com. Elecard. Retrieved March 19, 2018.
  11. ↑ Zimmerman, Steven (May 15, 2017). "Google's Royalty-Free Answer to HEVC: A Look at AV1 and the Future of Video Codecs". XDA Developers. Archived from the original on June 14, 2017. Retrieved June 10, 2017.
  12. ↑ Jan Ozer (September 1, 2015). "Amazon, Google, and More Working on Royalty-Free Codec". StreamingMedia.com. Retrieved September 2, 2015.
  13. ↑ aomedia (November 13, 2017). "Alliance for Open Media Welcomes Facebook to Its Board as Founding Member". Alliance for Open Media. Retrieved October 27, 2019.
  14. ↑ Shankland, Stephen. "Apple joins an alliance to shrink your online videos". CNET. Retrieved October 27, 2019.
  15. ↑ "Samsung Joins the Alliance for Open Media Board of Directors". Alliance for Open Media. April 3, 2019. Retrieved October 27, 2019.
  16. ↑ Licata, Scott (October 1, 2019). "Tencent Joins the Alliance for Open Media at the Board-Level". Alliance for Open Media. Retrieved October 27, 2019.
  17. ↑ Doctorow, Cory (January 30, 2018). "After industry adopts open video standards, MPEG founder says the end is nigh". boingboing.net. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  18. ↑ "Google's Project Caviar challenges Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision". tomsguide. September 25, 2022. Retrieved November 25, 2022.
  19. ↑ "Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) Progress Report" (PDF). 88 SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal. September 2022. doi:10.5594/JMI.2022.3190532.
  20. ↑ "AOM Decoder Q2 2022".
  21. ↑ "aomedia.org about". January 1, 2023.
  22. ↑ "Coding Tool Research for Next Generation AOM Coding Standard".
  23. ↑ "Challenges in incorporating ML in a mainstream nextgen video codec" (PDF).
  24. ↑ "AVM AOMedia GitLab".
  25. ↑ "AOMedia Source git clone".
  26. ↑ "Zoom Joins the Alliance for Open Media". Alliance for Open Media. June 21, 2023. Retrieved July 12, 2023.
  27. 1 2 "A Progress Report: The Alliance for Open Media and the AV1 Codec". Streaming Media Magazine. April 12, 2016. Retrieved April 13, 2016.
  28. ↑ "AV1: Status update". archive.fosdem.org.
  29. ↑ Eyevinn (December 12, 2017), STSWE17: Jai Krishnan from Google and AOMedia giving us an update on AV1 , retrieved January 5, 2018
  30. ↑ Sebastian Grüner (golem.de), July 19, 2016: Der nächste Videocodec soll 25 Prozent besser sein als H.265 (german)
  31. 1 2 "What is AV1?". Streaming Media Magazine. June 3, 2016. Retrieved June 20, 2016.
  32. ↑ Pennington, Adrian (March 10, 2020). "Sisvel Announces AV1 Patent Pool". Streaming Media Magazine. Retrieved October 13, 2023.
  33. ↑ Boulton, Clint (March 19, 2003). "W3C Publishes Patent Policy Draft". InternetNews.com. Retrieved March 17, 2018.
  34. 1 2 3 Mukherjee, Debargha (June 24, 2019). "AllThingsRTC 2019 - Opening Keynote - Past, Present and Future of AV1". YouTube. Agora.io. Retrieved August 22, 2019.
  35. ↑ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine : "Royalty-Free Video Encoding Netflix Meet-up". YouTube .
  36. ↑ Ozer, Jan (November 27, 2017). "HEVC IP Owners Are Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory". Streaming Learning Center. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  37. 1 2 aomedia. "They Developed It. They Benefit From It. They Stand Behind It. | Alliance for Open Media". Alliance for Open Media. Retrieved November 22, 2021.
  38. ↑ "They Developed It. They Benefit From It. They Stand Behind It. | Alliance for Open Media". aomedia.org. July 7, 2020. Archived from the original on July 7, 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.