To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015 that still resonate 10 years later. This update was for the week of September 5, 2015.
Alliance for Open Media home page, September 2015.
10 years ago this week the Alliance for Open Media launched.
This non-profit industry consortium formed to develop open, royalty-free technology for video and other media delivery. The founding members were industry leaders Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix.
In 2015, the most popular video format was AVC (H.264 or MPEG-4), and was due to be superseded by High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC or H.265). These are methods of compressing data while trying to retain video quality, which is really important for any platform delivering video.
Both AVC and HEVC are covered by multiple patents, and the licensing fees could cost millions of dollars. So, for example, implementing these codecs in Firefox could prevent the browser from being distributed for free, because of the licensing fees.
The Alliance for Open Media was formed to avoid that uncertainty and cost.
AOM's first release was the
AV1 video compression format in 2018.
Ten years ago this week, big tech companies including Google, Microsoft and
Amazon formed the Alliance for Open Media. The purpose was to develop open
source digital media technology.
Big Tech Forms an Alliance
Alliance for Open Media home page, September 2015.
10 years ago this week the Alliance for Open Media launched.
This non-profit industry consortium formed to develop open, royalty-free technology for video and other media delivery. The founding members were industry leaders Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix.
In 2015, the most popular video format was AVC (H.264 or MPEG-4), and was due to be superseded by High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC or H.265). These are methods of compressing data while trying to retain video quality, which is really important for any platform delivering video.
Both AVC and HEVC are covered by multiple patents, and the licensing fees could cost millions of dollars. So, for example, implementing these codecs in Firefox could prevent the browser from being distributed for free, because of the licensing fees.
The Alliance for Open Media was formed to avoid that uncertainty and cost.
Release of AV1
AV1 is designed especially for ultra high definition video, and real-time applications like WebRTC, video communication and streaming.
What about VP9?
Google's WebM Project was working on its own open and royalty-free video codecs, with VP9 (released in 2013) the latest version in 2015.
YouTube started encoding videos in VP9 in early 2015, after moving from Flash to HTML5 video. At the time, YouTube noted that VP9 "brings HD and even 4K (2160p) quality at half the bandwidth used by other known codecs". What that meant in practice was that if someone's internet connection previously could only play up to 480p video, VP9 allowed that same connection to smoothly play 720p video.
Sounds good, right? But Google's open-source video codecs weren’t widely adopted, possibly because companies didn’t
want to invest in using something controlled by Google. VP10
was under development in 2015, but the WebM Project joined the Alliance for Open Media, and that technology was incorporated into AV1 instead.
Google currently uses AV1 with YouTube and Google Meet.
Google currently uses AV1 with YouTube and Google Meet.
The View from 2025
I think it is interesting that it has taken years for AV1 to be supported by
the companies that make up the Alliance that developed the format.
From the original seven founding members, the Alliance has expanded to a
12 member Steering Committee
(adding Apple, Meta, nVidia, Samsung and Tencent), and almost 40 Promoter
Members (from Adobe to Zoom).
But despite the wide industry involvement, AV1 is still not universally
adopted.
The Alliance formed in 2015 and AV1 launched in 2018.
But those other codecs that require a license are still used. You can
play HEVC video in Chrome or
on Apple devices. And if
you want to play HEVC video on your Windows computer, you need to
pay for an extension.
- YouTube started testing AV1 video playback in 2018, but didn’t support it for live streams until a few months ago.
- Facebook also started testing in 2018.
- Vimeo adopted AV1 for its video players in 2019.
- Instagram adopted AV1 in 2022.
- Twitch started supporting AV1 in 2024.
- I couldn't find any information that suggested TikTok is on board.
The AOMedia has a
showcase of current use cases.
And on the 10th birthday of AV1, they announced the next generation video codec AV2. This will be released by the end of the year. But don't expect to see it soon. Only about half of AOMedia members plan to implement AV2 within the next year.
The take home message: It's not easy creating new open source formats, even
with the weight of Big Tech behind them.
Alliance for Open Media, 2024, AV1 Adoption Showcase
References
Alliance for Open Media website, September 2015
Alliance for Open Media, 28 March 2018:
The Alliance for Open Media Kickstarts Video Innovation Era with “AV1”
Release
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