AV1 (AOMedia Video 1) is a video coding format announced by the Alliance for Open Media to support principally video services over the Internet. The Alliance for Open Media is an industrial consortium founded in 2015 by Apple, Arm, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix.

AV1 developed following the merger of different independent pre-existing projects including: VP10 developed by Google in the WebM Project, Mozilla/Xiph’s Daala codec and Cisco’s Thor. Several releases of the reference code have been published between 2016 and 2018, the first version of the specification having been released on June 25th, 2018 by the Alliance for Open Media.

AV1 has been designed for real-time applications (WebRTC being an example) and compression of standard and high-quality content, including 4K, HDR and high framerate formats.

AV1 supports lossy and lossless coding and scalable formats.

For additional technical information relating to the AV1 technology visit https://aomedia.org/av1-features/get-started/