In Case You Haven’t Heard: Apple Joins Alliance for Open Media

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The skinny: Apple, a member of the MPEG LA H.264 and HEVC patent pools, and staunch supporter of standards (and avoider of open source-codecs) broke ranks and joined the Alliance for Open Media.

Give me more:

• Apple has always deployed standards-based codecs, and Steve Jobs was very negative on Google’s VP8 open-source codec when launched.
• Alliance for Open Media (AOM) formed in 2015 to consolidate multiple open-source codecs. Members included Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Mozilla. AOM’s first codec, AV1, should be released in early 2018.
• Apple added HEVC to HLS in June 2017, which many thought signaled Apple’s endorsement of HEVC and implied repudiation of AV1.
• Apple joining AOM probably relates more towards their planned content business than hardware business, but it puts Apple in the AOM camp.

But wait: AV1 is a work in process, and comparative quality, encoding time, and decode requirements are all unknown at this point. If battery-efficient playback on mobile devices requires hardware support, it will take at least two years for this to happen.