The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) officially has its first Chinese member after streaming media company iQIYI joined the group as a promoter member.
AOMedia is a nonprofit organization founded by members including Amazon, Apple, Arm, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix and NVIDIA. The group promotes the adoption of AV1, an open-source, royalty-free video codec.
"iQIYI is leading the Chinese entertainment industry by committing itself to smart technologies and their application in content production, innovation in marketing and business model development," said Yu Gong, founder and CEO of iQIYI, in a statement. "We are delighted to join AOMedia and look forward to engaging with other innovative companies to help promote fast, ultra high-quality video technology."
"We're pleased to welcome iQIYI to the Alliance for Open Media, reflecting the importance of video and entertainment service providers' engagement to achieve broad industry adoption," said Gabe Frost, executive director of AOMedia, in a statement. "We look forward to iQIYI's contributions to our initiatives and are excited at the prospect of introducing AV1 to hundreds of millions of iQIYI's customers in China."
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AOMedia officially released AV1 in late March. Matt Frost, head of strategy and partnerships for Google Chrome Media, said video providers like YouTube and Facebook will be adopting AV1 early for playback in HTML5 browsers.
“Nearly three years after launching AOMedia, the AV1 codec addresses real bottlenecks for unleashing the highest-quality video for the entire ecosystem, allowing for better viewing experiences across all screens and data networks,” said Gabe Frost. “By listening to the industry’s feedback in an open and collaborative manner and bringing together leading experts to develop AV1, an entire ecosystem can begin creating video products and experiences that customers love.”