Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix launch Alliance for Open Media to develop next-generation of royalty-free video formats
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
The seven founding members of the [[a:|Alliance for Open Media]] are all heavy video distributors or chipmakers — Netflix, Amazon, Google, Microsoft stream content at scale, Intel sells the silicon it decodes on, and Mozilla ships a browser — and none of them wants to keep paying per-unit royalties on the compression formats their businesses run on. The launch is aimed squarely at the licensed-codec model that dominated prior generations of video formats.
The move set a template that kept compounding: Apple, long absent from open-format coalitions, quietly joined the alliance in 2018, and by 2023 Adobe, Nvidia, Pixar, and Autodesk were copying the playbook with the Alliance for OpenUSD. The same coalition logic also surfaced outside media, with Mozilla and Intel launching the Bytecode Alliance for WebAssembly.
First-order effects
- The seven founders gain a path to next-generation video compression with no per-stream or per-device royalties, directly reducing format-licensing costs across their streaming platforms, browsers, and chips.
- Existing licensing pools for current-generation video codecs lose their most valuable licensees — the largest streamers and silicon vendors just organized against them.
Second-order effects
- Codec licensors face pressure to cut rates or risk their formats being frozen out of member products, since the alliance spans enough browsers, TVs, and CDNs to make adoption self-reinforcing.
- Hardware partners outside the founding seven face a choice between adding support for the new royalty-free format or watching member platforms optimize around it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, major internet infrastructure shifts toward consortium-developed, royalty-free standards rather than patented formats licensed through pools — a structure later extended to 3D content via the OpenUSD alliance.
- Royalty-free does not mean scrutiny-free: as the membership grew to include Apple and Meta, EU antitrust regulators opened a probe into the alliance's video licensing policy around its AV1 format, showing that collective standard-setting carries its own regulatory exposure.
The trend: Big tech is replacing per-unit codec licensing with founder-controlled standards consortia — a model that has since spread from video to WebAssembly and 3D scenes, while drawing antitrust attention as membership consolidates.