The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is a non-profit industry consortium developing next-generation, open-source, royalty-free digital media technology. Its key innovation is the AV1 video codec, which provides high compression efficiency and broad compatibility as an alternative to proprietary standards. The consortium also created the AVIF image format and the IAMF audio format, focusing on interoperability and open web standards. These open technologies enable widespread adoption across streaming, broadcasting, and multimedia applications without licensing fees.
Alliance for Open Media members are showcasing the AV2 codec ecosystem at IBC 2026, highlighting advancements in compression efficiency, interoperability, and tooling. The next-generation royalty-free standard promises 30% better compression than AV1 and is supported by major industry players including Netflix, Google, and Amazon.
The Alliance for Open Media has released the Open Audio Renderer (OAR) v1, a reference implementation for rendering spatial audio based on the IAMF specification. This release provides developers with an interoperable baseline for spatial audio across diverse playback hardware, including loudspeakers and headphones.
The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) website serves as a central hub for information regarding open-source digital media technology, primarily highlighting the AV1 video codec. It features recent news about advancements in AV1-related software, such as dav1d, Libavif v1.4.0, SVT-AV1 4.0, and the release of reference software for Polygonal Mesh Coding Standard. The site also announces new members joining the alliance, including Immersive Machines, Green Field Sound, and Qencode.
AOMedia released a draft of the AV2 specification for open public review and announced that AV1 now accounts for 30% of Netflix's global streaming traffic and over 70% of Meta users' video consumption. Additionally, AOMedia detailed progress on its Polygonal Mesh Coding (PMC) standard for 3D volumetric content and the AVIF 1.2 image format, while also welcoming new members including Disney and MediaKind.
This AOMedia article highlights the development and adoption of SVT-AV1, an open-source video encoder, noting its origins as an Intel and Netflix project and its current status as a flagship project of AOMedia's SIWG. The encoder offers significant compute scalability and bitrate efficiency improvements, including a "fast-decode" mode for older mobile devices. Meta uses SVT-AV1 for over 50% of video watch time on Facebook and Instagram.
