Things are moving fast for royalty-free video codecs. A month ago, the IETF NETVC Working Group had its first meeting and two weeks ago Cisco announced Thor. Today, we’re taking the next big step in this industry-wide effort with the formation of the Alliance for Open Media. Its founding members represent some of the biggest names in online video, such as Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube, multiple browser vendors including Mozilla, Microsoft, and Google, and key technology providers like Cisco and Intel. The Alliance has come together to share technology and run the kind of patent analysis necessary to build a next-generation royalty-free video codec.

Mozilla has long championed royalty-free codecs. The Web was built on innovation without asking permission, and patent licensing regimes are incompatible with some of the Web’s most successful business models. That’s why we already support great codecs like VP8, VP9, and Opus in Firefox. But the Web doesn’t stand still and neither do we. As resolutions and framerates increase, the need for more advanced codecs with ever-better compression ratios will only grow. We started our own Daala project and formed NETVC to meet those needs, and we’ve seen explosive interest in the result. We believe that Daala, Cisco’s Thor, and Google’s VP10 combine to form an excellent basis for a truly world-class royalty-free codec.

In order to allow us to move quickly, the alliance is structured as a Joint Development Foundation project. These are an ideal complement to a larger, open standards organization like the IETF: One of the biggest challenges in developing open standards in a field like video codecs is figuring out how to review the patents. The Alliance provides a venue for us to share the legal legwork without having to worry about it being used against us down the road. That distributes the load, allows us to innovate faster and cheaper, and gives everyone more confidence that we are really producing a royalty-free codec.

The Alliance will operate under W3C patent rules and release code under an Apache 2.0 license. This means all Alliance participants are waiving royalties both for the codec implementation and for any patents on the codec itself. The initial members are just a start. We invite anyone with an interest in video, online or off, to join us.

For further information please visit www.aomedia.org or view the press release.