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

Jan Ozer January 22, 2018 Blogs, Codecs Leave a comment 1,487 Views

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.

About Jan Ozer

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I help streaming and video technology companies solve complex technical and market-facing problems in practical business terms. Engagements range from fixed-scope audits and codec strategy reviews to product testing and technical content that helps customers, prospects, and internal teams connect technical performance to business outcomes. I am a contributing editor to Streaming Media Magazine, writing about codecs and encoding tools. I have written multiple authoritative books on video encoding, including Video Encoding by the Numbers: Eliminate the Guesswork from your Streaming Video (https://amzn.to/3kV6R1j) and Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg: In Thirty Minutes or Less (https://amzn.to/3ZJih7e). I have multiple courses relating to streaming media production, all available at https://bit.ly/slc_courses.

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