Many of the components of the AV1 project were sourced from previous research efforts by Alliance members. Free Software Foundation Europe has argued that FRAND patent licensing practices make the free software implementation of standards impossible due to various incompatibilities with free software licenses. For example, building an H.264 implementation into Firefox would prevent it from being distributed free of charge since licensing fees would have to be paid to MPEG-LA. The negative effect of patent licensing on free and open-source software has also been cited as a reason for the creation of AV1. According to Microsoft's Ian LeGrow, an open-source, royalty-free technology was seen as the easiest way to eliminate this uncertainty around licensing. In addition, various patent holders were refusing to license patents via either pool, increasing uncertainty about HEVC's licensing. Unlike previous MPEG standards where the technology in the standard could be licensed from a single entity, MPEG-LA, when the HEVC standard was finished, two patent pools had been formed with a third pool on the horizon. In addition to the increased cost, the complexity of the licensing process increased with HEVC. Only 42 days before, on 21 July 2015, HEVC Advance's initial licensing offer was announced to be an increase over the royalty fees of its predecessor, AVC. 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. ĪVIF 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.

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