Apple has added its power to the Alliance for Open Media, a collection of tech’s biggest names working to shrink the size of online videos to provide a better streaming experience, CNET reports. The group is creating a technology called AV1 to compress video before it’s stored or transmitted.
Until now Apple has been a major holdout, but the company recently appeared as a “founding member” on the group’s website, sending a signal of newfound strong support. Apple has previously focused on the more closed HEVC/H.265 video format, implementing it for FaceTime over cellular in 2014, and more recently bringing it to iOS 11 for video recording.
However the licensing fees involved in this more proprietary formats has limited its widespread adoption, necessitating background conversion to H.264 when sharing and exporting videos to ensure maximum compatibility. Moving to a more widely held standard across multiple platforms and companies could eliminate that step, but Apple hasn’t publicly commented on what joining the AOM will mean for its own formats.
