Peter Bright from Ars Technica reporting on the formation of the Alliance for Open Media:
The group’s first aim is to produce a video codec that’s a meaningful improvement on HEVC. Many of the members already have their own work on next-generation codecs; Cisco has Thor, Mozilla has been working on Daala, and Google on VP9 and VP10. Daala and Thor are both also under consideration by the IETF’s netvc working group, which is similarly trying to assemble a royalty-free video codec.
This alliance has the potential to mitigate some of the issues around licenses and royalties for video codecs. As Bright points out, though, the alliance isn’t immune to claims by patent holders, which have hampered similar solo efforts by Microsoft and Google in the past. Hopefully the collective clout of the companies involved will be enough to see off those challengers.
Source: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, others, aim for royalty-free video codecs | Ars Technica