AOMedia (Alliance for Open Media) is an industry consortium founded in 2015 to develop royalty-free media codecs. Its founding members include Google, Mozilla, Cisco, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, and Intel.
AOMedia and WebRTC
AOMedia’s primary contribution to WebRTC is the AV1 video codec, which is the next-generation royalty-free codec positioned to succeed VP9 and compete with H.265. AV1 offers:
- ~30% better compression than VP9 at comparable quality
- SVC (Scalable Video Coding) support
- No patent licensing costs (unlike MPEG-LA-managed codecs)
AOMedia was formed specifically as a response to the increasing patent complexity and royalty costs around H.265/HEVC. The alliance is also developing AV2, the next generation codec.
On the audio side, AOMedia is developing OAC (Open Audio Codec), a next-generation audio codec based on Opus and intended as its successor. Together with AV1/AV2 for video, OAC aims to complete AOMedia’s royalty-free media stack.
Google Meet and other major WebRTC platforms have adopted AV1 for real-time video, demonstrating its viability for interactive communication.
