Online video tech company Vimeo said it has joined the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) as a promoter member.

The move adds IAC-owned Vimeo to the backers of AV1, a new royalty-free video codec that is billed as being at least 30% more efficient than current-gen codecs such as HEVC and VP9. Some big names behind AV1 include Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft.

AV1 made its big splash at last month’s NAB show in Las Vegas.

RELATED: Royalty-Free AV1 Codec Turned Loose

Though hardware support for AV1 considered to be about two years away, much of the early implementations will be via software in browsers. The bulk of AV1 use cases will also center on OTT video, making it a good fit for Vimeo’s platform.

NAB 2018: Hardware Support a Big Step Ahead for AV1

"Vimeo is excited and proud to join the Alliance for Open Media,” Naren Venkataraman, head of technology at Vimeo, said in a statement. “We look forward to working alongside AOMedia members to shape the next-generation codec that will unify the industry and fundamentally improve video experiences for creators and viewers everywhere."

"We’re pleased to welcome Vimeo to the Alliance for Open Media, reflecting the importance of online and live streaming engagement to achieve broad industry adoption," added Gabe Frost, a Microsoft exec who is also executive director for the Alliance for Open Media. "We look forward to Vimeo's contributions to this significant initiative, which will open the door to a new era of openness and interoperability for internet video." 

Facebook has moved a step forward with its support for AV1, the royalty-free codec that aims to deliver bandwidth efficiencies that are about 30% better than current-gen codecs such as HEVC and VP9.

Facebook, which recently claimed to have produced bit-rate efficiencies of 50% in AV1 benchmark studies, announced in this blog post that it has added trial support for the new format to Facebook video. Facebook timed the announcement with this week’s Video@Scale event.

Facebook: Tests Show AV1 Streaming Performance is Exceeding Expectations

The AV1 video trial, Facebook noted, “allows engineers and the general public to view sample AV1 content today.”

RELATED: Royalty-Free AV1 Codec Turned Loose

For the test, Facebook is delivering AV1-encoded video over MPEG-DASH on Chrome Canary, an experimental version of the Chrome browser. The initial trial is using an earlier version of AV1, but Facebook plans to switch to the official AV1 release version once major web browsers such as Chrome and Firefox have implemented the new codec.

Facebook also points out that AV1 has some caveats today, as it requires longer encoding times than current alternatives because of the increased complexity.

To help to overcome the slow performance of the AV1 encoder, Facebook said it used a “segment-based encoding approach” that splits the video into smaller segment files.

“In the context of distributed video encoding and processing, per-segment tasks are executed in parallel for every video segment of a given input video so that it allows us to speed up the overall AV1 encoding almost linearly with the number of tasks allocated to the encoding cluster,” Facebook engineers Daniel Baulig and Yu Liu noted, along with steps to take to view AV1-encoded sample videos on Facebook.

Initial AV1 implementations of AV1 will be done in software, with support on chips and other hardware expected to be another two years out.

NAB 2018: Hardware Support a Big Step Ahead for AV1

With giants such as Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft in its corner, the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) has released the 1.0 version of AV1, a next-gen, royalty-free codec that claims to have a 30% bit-rate efficiency edge over current-gen technologies like VP9 and HEVC.

The consortium is releasing AV1 in the hopes that it will deliver improved bandwidth efficiencies amid the move to video formats with more pixels (like 4K and 8K), better pixels (High Dynamic Range and Wide Color Gamut), as well as the emergence of 360-degree video, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) apps and services that need to be smooth and are poised to ratchet up bit rate requirements on TV screens, laptops, tablets and smartphones. 

Though AV1, which is also claimed to have a 65% bandwidth savings over AVC/H.264, could eventually find itself a home inside set-top boxes and, perhaps even further out broadcast TV signals, it’s expected to initially find adoption on web browsers and other types of OTT streaming devices.

“Video is changing the way the internet is evolving,” Gabe Frost, the executive director and a founding board member of AOMedia and a principal engineering manager for Microsoft’s operating systems group, said in an interview. 

Another chief aim for AV1 and its royalty-free model is to eliminate some of the pricing uncertainty that has enveloped codecs like HEVC, which has been saddled by multiple patent pools and little in the way of uniformity on rates.

RELATED: HEVC Advance Cuts Back on Some Royalty Rates, Caps

The current codec market is “gummed up” due to the cost uncertainty, Frost said, and has likewise caused friction between technology innovators that those that want to charge for patented technologies that can help them. 

AOMedia, launched in 2015, was formed with the core idea that the underlying video codec technology had become a commodity, and that a royalty-free model represented the best path forward. 

“We all use it; it all gets baked into silicon,” Frost said.

The plan with AV1 then focused on how a new approach, despite being royalty-free, could still “create a viable business model to move the industry forward, with some certainty around the costs of producing these codecs,” he explained.

While that idea was spawned by early meetings with Microsoft and Google, it later expanded to include several other in the ecosystem, including chipmakers, distributors, web services companies and video equipment makers, that would be willing to provide their intellectual property under the royalty-free model.

Examples of founding members of AOMedia include Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco Systems, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix and Nvidia. Promoter members include Adobe, CableLabs, Bitmovin, Hulu, Vidyo, and Broadcom, among others.

Frost said every member company of AOMedia signs an agreement that licenses the essential technology that’s used in the final AV1 codec on a royalty-free basis. And those that implement it likewise sign a cross-patent license agreement that says they’re free to use AV1 at no cost, but that if they hold any essential patents, those are licensed to other AOMedia members on a royalty-free basis.

“We wanted to make sure we had a licensing infrastructure set up where we could create a durable, royalty-free ecosystem,” Frost said, noting that companies with patents used for codecs such as HEVC and H.264 are free to license those same patents under other terms, such as those that are governed by AV1.

The hope is that the model will accelerate the adoption cycle of AV1 and spark advancements across software, silicon, devices and connectivity and push the market forward for all stakeholders.

“Royalty-free doesn’t mean that people aren’t making money off the technology,” Frost said.

As for near-term expectations, Frost said desktop browsers will start to support AV1 later this year, and see it start to show up on devices such as gaming consoles towards the end of 2018 or into 2019. 

In a presentation about today’s release, AOMedia noted that AV1 would be “coming to a screen near you,” with examples that included Twitch, Facebook, Android, Amazon Prime Video, Chromebook, Chrome, Google Play, Netflix, Windows, Xbox One, Daydream (Google’s VR platform), Skype, and YouTube.

“It will be 2020 when we see it available on all new silicon that comes out,” Frost predicted.

Michelle Abraham, senior analyst, media and communications at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said the buy-in among a wide number of companies and players gives AV1 a “good opportunity” to make waves in the video codec market.

She sees its greatest opportunity coming from video streaming and OTT, but doesn’t expect to see it widely used by broadcasters, who typically go with technologies that are tied to international standards bodies.

There’s also a question about whether the latency requirements of broadcasters will be suited to AV1, at least in its initial release.

AV1 will be getting some play at next month’s NAB show in Las Vegas, including demos on April 10 from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. at the South Upper Hall Destination NXT Stage.

A panel is also slated for April 11 starting at 3:20 p.m. at the North Hall (N257) that will feature Microsoft’s Gabe Frost, Google’s Matt Frost, Intel’s Zach Hamm, Bitmovin’s Stefan Lederer, Microsoft’s David Rudin, and Netflix’s Mark Watson.