We're joining Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix to develop compression standards, make them widely available - and royalty free.
At BBC R&D we’re acutely aware that the distribution of video content to millions of devices would not be possible without video compression. Recent breakthroughs have led to the development of technologies that enable drastic reduction of bitrates for content delivery over the web and by broadcast. Worldwide industry standards are important to support an ecosystem that enables content creation, delivery and consumption.
BBC Research and Development has a long tradition in participating in developments of open standards, and has recently reached a milestone by releasing an efficient implementation of open source H.265 / HEVC encoder as the Turing codec.
As part of our continuous efforts to actively support the development of technologies for one of our core businesses, media creation and delivery, we have joined the Alliance for Open Media.
The main objective of the Alliance is to make developed technologies widely available and ultimately free of royalties. The current goal is to develop a competitive royalty-free video codec specification and open source implementation. On this occasion the BBC will cooperate with a number of key partners in this field, such as the founding members of the AOMedia: Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix.
With content, software and hardware providers on board, each of which have significant expertise in delivering widely adopted solutions for video compression, the work of the AOMedia is well placed to reach its ultimate goals. At the moment the work within AOMedia is focusing on practical codec development and rigorous testing under challenging conditions.
The AOMedia video codec, AV1, is now available as an open source project, and is currently under development to become a competitive solution for delivery of high quality and next generation content.
This will ensure the interoperability and adaptability required to consume content anytime and anywhere. With the availability of billions of devices that support video playback globally, the need to provide open and efficient codecs is becoming more important than ever, which is also reflected in the growth of the AOMedia community.
We’re looking forward to being a member of the Alliance for Open Media and to contributing towards its development.