Alliance for Open Media
 | |
| Abbreviation | AOMedia, AOM |
|---|---|
| Formation | September 1, 2015 |
| Founder | Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix |
| Type | Industy consortium |
| Purpose | Development of a royalty-free video format |
| Headquarters | Wakefield, Massachusetts, U.S.A. |
| Products | |
Members (2020) | 46 |
Parent organization | Joint Development Foundation |
| Website | aomedia.org |
The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is an American industry group promoting royalty-free open multimedia standards. They are notable for the development of the AV1 video format and the AVIF image format. AOMedia was founded by, and is completely controlled by, large US-based multinational corporations.
History[edit]
AOMedia was founded on September 1st 2015 with the goal of developing a royalty-free video format. The founding members were Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix.
Xiph.Org Foundation, founded in 1994, already existed and so did the free audio and video standards (Ogg Theora, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Opus, and many more) developed by that organization. That large corporate interests behind AOMedia chose to ignore that more grass-roots controlled organization and start their own even though both organizations have, on paper, almost identical goals.
Many large corporations jumped onboard the AOMedia industry consortium in the years following its foundation:
- AOMedia announced that AMD, ARM and Nvidia had joined on April 5th, 2016.
- AOMedia announced that Adobe, Ateme, Ittiam and Vidyo joined in the second half of 2016.
- Facebook joined as a governing member on November 13th, 2017.
- Apple joined as a governing member in January 2018.
- Samsung Electronics joined as a governing member on April 3rd, 2019.
- The Chinese conglomerate Tencent was accepted as a governing member on October 1st, 2019.
Governance[edit]
AOMedia is technically a US-based tax-exempt non-profit organization. It is in practice a joint venture between large mostly US-based multinational for-profit corporations.
There are two types of members:
- "Governing members" are members who get to have a seat on the board of directors. AOMedia refers to them as "founding" members even though about half of the current governing members are not members who took part in the groups founding.
- "General members" are members who get to pay fees and have some say in the standards developed by AOMedia. They do not get to be on the board.
| Governing members | General members | |
|---|---|---|
|
| |
Products[edit]
AOMedia has so far released two commonly adopted standards:
Own Use Of Free Formats[edit]
AOMedia does not use or promote free and open standards beyond the standard they themselves develop and promote. The organizations press kits are only available in the proprietary .docx and .pptx file formats.[1]. Their press kits "Logo Files" are only available as .eps, .jpg and .png - it is not available in the organizations own .avif image format.
Footnotes[edit]
- ↑ aomedia.org: AOMedia Press Kit
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