Seven technology giants; Google, Netflix, Mozilla, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel and Amazon collaborate to work on with an open source video format that would abolish video plugins soon.
"The Alliance for Open Media brings together the leading experts in the entire video stack to work together in pursuit of open, royalty-free and interoperable solutions for the next generation of video delivery," Gabe Frost, Director of the Alliance for Open Media said in its press release published on September 1.
Frost said that as people's expectation of high-definition content gets higher, it requires a full cooperation from the entire tech industry.
In a way, Mozilla had mastered royalty-free codecs. But the innovation that was built asked no permissions and some of the licensing patents are not compatible with other models. So they come up with codecs like Opus, VP8 and VP9.
The company says in the Mozilla blog that the Web still isn't that robust, "As resolutions and framerates increase, the need for more advanced codecs with ever-better compression ratios will only grow."
Inevitably, the main purpose of the Open Media is to address the demand for an open codec in video compression across the web to improve delivery time, video playbacks and enhance its quality in every device in the world including desktop, smartphones, tablet and smart TVs.
The alliance is formed by the seven companies and is a project of an independent non-profit organization, the Joint Development Foundation, to support tech initiatives with regards to corporate and legal matters in applying new standards and source code developments.
So the project means unification of media format, media file encryption and adaptable streaming. Initially, it will generate a royalty-free specification for video codec from its members' contributions.
Application Resource Center for Applause remarked that this is the end of video plugins in the Web as video plugins dominates the Internet for a long time and it's getting outdated.
The project will combine applications from VP8, VP9, Daala, Cisco's Thor and Google's WebM. The video codec will be launched under Apache License 2.0 free software.
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