AOMedia Video 1

AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It is being developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium of leading firms from the semiconductor industry, video on demand providers, and web browser developers, founded in 2015. It is the primary contender for standardisation by the video standard working group NetVC of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The group has put together a list of criteria to be met by the new video standard. It is meant to replace Google's VP9 and compete with HEVC/H.265 from the Moving Picture Experts Group.

AV1 can be used together with the audio format Opus in a future version of the WebM format for HTML5 web video and WebRTC.

The main distinguishing feature is its royalty-free (patent) licensing terms that set it apart, notably from its main competitor HEVC with its complicated and costly software patent licensing situation. Whether it can be convincingly argued that it does not infringe on patents of competing companies is seen as crucial for the chances for widespread adoption. Under patent rules adopted from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), technology contributors license their AV1-connected patents to anyone, anywhere, anytime based on reciprocity, i.e. as long as the user on his part doesn't engage in patent litigations.

It aims for state of the art performance with a noticeable compression efficiency advantage at only slightly increased coding complexity. The efficiency goal is 25% improvement over HEVC. At the beginning of June 2016 its performance was already comparable to HEVC as measured using the objective metric PSNR-HVS-M.

...
Wikipedia