Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft and others team up to develop royalty-free video formats

Internet giants join forces to develop media formats - so they don't have to pay royalties to the likes of MPEG LA

Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel and Mozilla have teamed up to work on an open-source project to develop royalty-free media formats, codecs and technologies.

The seven organisations have come together to create the Alliance for Open Media, and will collaborate to create a new, open, royalty-free video codec specification based on the contributions of each of the members.

Mozilla and Cisco already have their own next-gen codec projects, while Google is working on its own. The suggestion is that ideas from each project will be taken on board for the new specification.

The initial focus will be on developing a video format that is optimised for the web, and scalable to any device at any bandwidth. The video format will also be interoperable and open, have a low computational footprint, and be optimised for hardware.

The alliance will then work on creating standards for other video, audio, imagery and streaming technologies.

One of the key reasons for the Alliance is to ensure that the organisations don't have to continue to pay royalties to the likes of MPEG LA, a firm that licenses patent pools for the use of certain standards, such as MPEG-2.

The Alliance plans to publish its code under the Apache 2.0 licence and will operate under W3C patent rules, meaning that the seven companies will waive royalties from the codec implementations and their patents on the codec itself. Mozilla said that there will be a "patent analysis" to ensure that any new format does not infringe on patents of non-members.

"Customer expectations for media delivery continue to grow, and fulfilling their expectations requires the concerted energy of the entire ecosystem," said Gabe Frost, the Alliance for Open Media's executive director.

"The Alliance for Open Media brings together the leading experts in the entire video stack to work together in pursuit of open, royalty-free and interoperable solutions for the next generation of video delivery," he added.

The Alliance said that information on how to join the group will be made available later this year.