WAKEFIELD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) announced today that Facebook has joined the Alliance as a Founding Member, the highest level of the organization, and will have a seat on the board of directors. Facebook joins board members Amazon, ARM, Cisco, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix and NVIDIA in pledging its support to accelerate development and facilitate the friction-free adoption of the AOMedia Video codec, AV1.

As a media technology innovator and AOMedia board member, Facebook will play a leadership role in shaping the open and interoperable media streaming standards that power video on the web.

“As the amount of video being watched and shared online continues to grow, we are committed to making the video experience even better,” said Mike Coward, engineering director at Facebook. “By joining the Alliance for Open Media at the highest level, Facebook can directly participate in the advancement of technologies to help achieve this mission.”

As a founding member of the Alliance for Open Media, Facebook will actively engage with AOMedia’s open-source community of leading companies to create new technologies that will help bring better media experiences to billions of customers and their devices.

“The Alliance for Open Media is pleased to have Facebook join our board,” said Gabe Frost, executive director of the organization. “Facebook brings its world-class engineers to support the development and adoption of AV1. Using AOMedia’s open framework, our combined knowledge and expertise will multiply our collective efforts to deliver next-generation video experiences.”

AOMedia’s AV1, the Alliance’s open-source video compression standard, strives to deliver improved compression efficiency over the current state of the art standards, in addition to providing the industry with an open-source, royalty-free, interoperable video format. AOMedia Video is an important step toward fulfilling the organization’s promise to deliver a next-generation video format that is:

• Interoperable and open;
• Optimized for internet delivery;
• Scalable to any modern device at any bandwidth;
• Designed with a low computational footprint and optimized for hardware;
• Capable of consistent, highest-quality, real-time video delivery; and
• Flexible for both commercial and non-commercial content, including user-generated content.

About the Alliance for Open Media

The Alliance for Open Media is a Joint Development Foundation Projects, LLC series. The Joint Development Foundation is an independent non-profit organization that provides the corporate and legal infrastructure to enable groups to establish and operate standards and source code development collaborations. Launched in 2015, the Alliance for Open Media was formed to define and develop media technologies to address marketplace demand for an open standard for video compression and delivery over the web.