AOMedia: Reflections on 2025 and the Work Ahead
By Dr. Pierre-Anthony Lemieux, Executive Director, AOMedia
2025 proved to be another exciting year for the Alliance for Open Media, with more coming in 2026.
After 5 Years, AV2 is Here
After 5 years of work, hundreds of meetings and 2700+ commits against the reference software, a draft of the AV2 specification is now available for open public review at:
More than just a specification, it comes with an open reference software implementation.
AV1: From Emerging to Ubiquitous
AV1 achieved deployment on a global scale: Netflix reports that AV1 now constitutes 30% of its global streaming traffic and Meta reports that more than 70% of its users now consume AV1 video across their platforms.
New Doors Open with Polygonal Mesh Coding (PMC)
AOMedia is looking beyond 2D video with the upcoming Polygonal Mesh Coding (PMC) standard that standardizes how 3D volumetric content is compressed and delivered. PMC will be a critical enabler for the metaverse, gaming, and AR/VR applications, bringing the same open-standard efficiency to 3D geometry that AV1 brought to video.
AVIF 1.2: The Modern Standard for Images on the Web
On the still image front, the release of AVIF 1.2 has further solidified the format's position as the modern successor to legacy web image formats. With superior compression and advanced features, AVIF is now the default choice for a faster, visually richer web.
Open Software: Relentless Improvement
The open software tools powering AOMedia standards continued to mature and improve in 2025, with new releases of dav1d, SVT-AV1, libspatialaudio, libavif, libaom and many others. These tools make AOMedia standards easier to adopt and improve interoperability across the ecosystem.
Award-Winning Impact
The impact of AOMedia’s technical work has not gone unnoticed. In 2025, AOMedia was honored with a Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award for the development of the AV1 specification and an IBC Innovation Award in the "Content Everywhere" category for making video streaming viable on low-end mobile devices via the introduction of decoding-aware modes in the SVT-AV1 encoder.
Powered by Collaboration
AOMedia is an open organization that brings together a diversity of stakeholders to collaborate on technology that advances online media. From industry leaders to disruptive startups to higher education representatives, and beyond, AOMedia members are dedicated to delivering the standards needed to provide a better experience, for both content providers and consumers. We welcome new members of all types and were happy to add a strong new contingent in 2025:
- ANT Group
- Spatial9
- MediaKind
- Pozalabs
- Disney
- Two Orioles
- University of York
- Airoha
- Qencode
- Greenfield Sound
Check-out our full list of members and join the effort!
Thank you to all who helped make 2025 a successful year!