Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia): The Consortium Behind AV1

The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is a non-profit industry consortium founded on September 1, 2015, to develop open, royalty-free multimedia delivery standards. It operates under the Joint Development Foundation and is headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts. ## Why It Was Formed The catalyst was the patent licensing disaster surrounding H.265/HEVC. When HEVC Advance, a second patent pool, launched in 2015 with significantly higher royalty demands than MPEG LA's existing pool, streaming companies faced unpredictable and potentially ruinous licensing obligations. Rather than paying into a system they couldn't budget for, major technology and media companies decided to build their own royalty-free alternative. ## Founding Members Seven companies co-founded AOMedia: Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix. Each brought an existing open codec project — Google had VP10 (successor to VP9), Cisco had Thor, and Mozilla had Daala. Instead of competing, they merged these projects into a single effort. ## Governance and Growth The governing board has since expanded to 12 members: Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Google, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung, and Tencent. Over 43 additional organizations participate as general members. The breadth of membership — spanning chipmakers, browser vendors, streaming platforms, and device manufacturers — ensures the resulting standards have wide hardware and software support at launch. ## Key Output: AV1 AOMedia's primary deliverable is AV1: The Royalty-Free Codec That Won the Web, released in 2018. AV1 achieves approximately 30% better compression than H.265 at equivalent quality, with a completely royalty-free license. It is now the dominant codec for web video delivery. AV2, the successor, had its draft specification released in February 2026. The scale of AOMedia's success was acknowledged in 2018 by an MPEG founder, who called it "the biggest threat to their business model."