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Interoperable, Open

Alliance for Open Media Launched To Pool Resources in Building Royalty-Free Video Codec

Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix are among founding members of the Alliance for Open Media. The alliance was announced Tuesday with a charter to pool resources to build a next-generation royalty-free video codec. The initial focus is to deliver a video format that is interoperable and open; optimized for the Web; scalable to any modern device at any bandwidth; designed with a low computational footprint and optimized for hardware; capable of consistent, highest quality, real-time video delivery; and flexible for both commercial and noncommercial content, including user-generated content, it said.

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First on the agenda is to create an open, royalty-free video codec specification based on the contribution of members “along with binding specifications for media format, content encryption and adaptive streaming, thereby creating opportunities for next-generation media experiences,” the alliance said. It “brings together the leading experts in the entire video stack,” said Executive Director Gabe Frost, who said information on how to join the alliance will be made available later this year. The alliance is a project of the Joint Development Foundation, an independent nonprofit that provides the corporate and legal infrastructure to enable groups to establish and operate standards and source code development collaborations.

The effort is an “ideal complement to a larger, open standards organization like the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force],” David Bryant, Mozilla interim chief technology officer, said in a blog post Tuesday. One of the biggest challenges in developing open standards for video codecs is “figuring out how to review the patents,” he said. The alliance provides a venue to “share the legal legwork without having to worry about it being used against us down the road,” he said. 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,” he said.

The alliance will operate under World Wide Web Consortium patent rules and release code under an Apache 2.0 license, Bryant said, meaning participants are waiving royalties for codec implementation and for any patents on the codec itself, he said. “We invite anyone with an interest in video, online or off, to join us.”

Jonathan Rosenberg, Cisco’s chief technology officer in its Collaboration business, said last month in a blog post (see 1508140051) that it's one of the companies leading the charge for a “high quality, next-generation codec that can be used everywhere.” That is because “the patent licensing situation for H.265 has recently taken a turn for the worse” with the formation of “two distinct patent licensing pools” -- MPEG LA and HEVC Advance -- that are costly and missing many H.265 license holders among their licensor members, he wrote. Cisco created Thor as a new codec development process that “would allow us to work through the long list of patents in this space, and continually evolve our codec to work around or avoid those patents,” Rosenberg said. Cisco “open-sourced” the code, and contributed Thor to the IETF, which has begun standards activity to develop a next-gen royalty-free video codec in its NetVC workgroup, he said.