The official announcement of AV1 came with the press release on the formation of the Alliance for Open Media on 1 September 2015. Additionally, the Alliance's seven founding members – Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix – announced that the initial focus of the video format would be delivery of high-quality web video. The Alliance's motivations for creating AV1 included the high cost and uncertainty involved with the patent licensing of HEVC, the MPEG-designed codec expected to succeed AVC. ĪV1 Image File Format ( AVIF) is an image file format that uses AV1 compression algorithms. Like VP9, but unlike H.264/AVC and HEVC, AV1 has a royalty-free licensing model that does not hinder adoption in open-source projects. In 2018, Facebook conducted testing that approximated real world conditions, and the AV1 reference encoder achieved 34%, 46.2% and 50.3% higher data compression than libvpx-vp9, x264 high profile, and x264 main profile respectively. The AV1 bitstream specification includes a reference video codec. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 that includes semiconductor firms, video on demand providers, video content producers, software development companies and web browser vendors. AOMedia Video 1 ( AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet.
