All The Big Names Are Joining A New Alliance For Open Media

Realizing that H.265 licensing is expensive, software patents make things a mess, and all the other negatives about proprietary video codecs, a number of large organizations today announced an Alliance For Open Media.

Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix have formed this Alliance for Open Media. Those are the founding companies while others will probably join on soon. This alliance should serve as a place for stakeholders to collaborate over royalty-free video codecs. Of course, among the codecs being worked on are VP9/VP10, Daala, and the newest is Cisco's Thor.

Proprietary video codecs have become a bloody problem for large and small companies as well as individual users.

Those wishing to find out more about the Alliance For Open Media can visit their new website at aomedia.org. There's also a blog post today about it from the Xiph.Org perspective. That post also notes that Microsoft now intends to ship Vorbis, Opus, WebM, and VP9 within their new Windows Edge browser.