Roger Fingas
Perhaps looking to get around licensing issues with H.265/HEVC, Apple has silently become a founding member of the Alliance for Open Media, a group working on a new video compression format known as AV1.
The Alliance added Apple to its website on Wednesday, according to CNET. Other founding members include Amazon, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, and Nvidia — among lower-level partners are Adobe, AMD, Hulu, and VLC maker VideoLAN.
Until now Apple has been a major holdout, opting for H.264 and H.265 across its platforms. That decision has made it beholden to patent holders wanting royalty payments, however, whereas AV1 could potentially be free of those obligations.
AV1 is also said to offer better compression, shrinking filesizes by 25 to 35 percent versus H.265 and Google's VP9.
Indeed Apple's interest may stem as much from the evolution of video as avoiding royalties. With the launch of the Apple TV 4K, the company has also begun hosting 4K video on iTunes, which can consume tremendous amounts of bandwidth and storage for both Apple and viewers. 8K video is already on the horizon, even if it's unlikely to reach most Apple devices in the near future.
Amber Neely
Andrew Orr
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
15 Comments
If they were added to the website yesterday, why don't I see their logo between Amlogic and Argon Design on that site? Was this retracted?
Oh I SO look forward to @ericthehalfbee 's reaction to Apple finally buying into the Google-led royalty-free alternative to HEVC. We've had numerous discussions in the past about this, some relatively recently....
but I expect him to avoid doing so.
Wait, so how did Apple become a founding Member when they were the last to sign up?