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Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia)

Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia / AOM) is an industry consortium founded in 2015 by Netflix, Google, Amazon, Meta, Mozilla, Cisco, Microsoft, and Intel to "develop and promote next generation, open source media technologies" — specifically royalty-free video + image codecs designed to be deployable at internet scale without the licensing drag that crippled HEVC/H.265. Homepage: aomedia.org.

AOMedia is the canonical wiki instance of the open codec consortium pattern — major streaming services, browsers, chipmakers, and CDNs pooling cross-licenses under a single royalty-free governance umbrella instead of paying per-unit royalties into a fragmented HEVC-style pool.

Output

AOMedia's shipping projects, as of 2025-12:

  • AV1 — the consortium's first major project; spec released 2018 after 3 years of collaborative development. Royalty-free successor-class to HEVC. Now ~30% of Netflix streaming traffic (Source: sources/2025-12-05-netflix-av1-now-powering-30-of-netflix-streaming).
  • dav1d — AOM-sponsored open-source AV1 software decoder; released June 2018, six months after the AV1 spec finalised. Android's default software decoder; powers ~40% of Netflix browser playback.
  • AV2 — announced by AOMedia for end-of-2025 launch (press release). Successor to AV1; targets further compression gains + streaming-feature additions. Not yet deployed at any streaming service at 2025-12 disclosure time.
  • AVIF — AV1-based image format (still-image container) with HDR + wide-colour-gamut support. Not yet on wiki scope.

Governance model

AOMedia founding members (2015) — ultimately expanded to a wider membership — each contribute patents to a shared royalty-free pool and cross-license among each other. Per Netflix's 2025-12 retrospective: "In 2015, together with a group of like-minded industry leaders, Netflix co-founded the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) to develop and promote next generation, open source media technologies. The AV1 codec became the first major project of this collaboration, with ambitious goals: to deliver significant improvements in compression efficiency over state-of-the-art codecs, and to introduce rich features that enable new use cases."

Netflix's framing of the 2015 AOM founding, the 2018 AV1 release, the 2025 AV1-at-30%-share milestone, and the 2025 AV2 launch announcement is one 10-year industry bet, not a sequence of independent projects.

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