Seven leading Internet companies have teamed up to create the next generation of technology for distributing media.
The Alliance for Open Media's founding companies are Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Cisco, Intel and Moxilla, many of which have been developing their own software for encoding and decoding high quality video streams for the web.
The alliance brings together “technology and expertise to meet growing Internet demand for the highest-quality video, audio, imagery and streaming across devices of all kinds and for users worldwide,” AOM said in a statement Monday.
AOM is initially focusing on a next-generation video format that is interoperable and open, consistent and capable for real time video delivery.
The alliance emphasized the importance of a new codec – a computer program capable of compressing and decompressing digital data – that is free and flexible to use for both commercial and non-commercial content, including user-generated content, for individuals and organizations.