Agora.io Joins the Alliance for Open Media

3 minute read

WAKEFIELD, Mass. – October 24, 2019 – The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) today announced that Agora.io, the leading voice, video, and live interactive streaming platform, has joined as a Promoter member. Agora utilizes machine learning and proprietary network technology to deliver high-quality, low latency experiences globally across mobile, web and desktop apps.

As a member of the Alliance, Agora will collaborate with AOMedia members to advance open standards for media compression and delivery over the web. AOMedia members include the leading internet and media technology companies like Amazon, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, NVIDIA, Samsung Electronics, and Tencent.

The availability of AOMedia Video Codec 1.0 (AV1) AOMedia's open-source initiative, is a significant milestone in the ability to deliver a next-generation video format that is interoperable, open, optimized for internet delivery and scalable to any modern device at any bandwidth. AV1 enables more screens to display the vivid images, deeper colors, brighter highlights, darker shadows, and other enhanced UHD imaging features that consumers and businesses have come to expect – all while using less data.

"We're thrilled to be part of the Alliance for Open Media and have the opportunity to work alongside some of the world's most innovative technology and media companies, bringing our real-time video and voice platform to AV1 to deliver an engaging experience for users," said Tony Zhao, CEO at Agora. "This membership brings real-time video and voice to a broader range of applications, and we are excited to see how the community at large adopts those rich features."

"We're excited to welcome Agora to the Alliance for Open Media, reflecting our joint commitment to leverage how AV1 is able to improve streaming media in new and cutting-edge ways," said Matt Frost, AOMedia Vice President of Communications and Membership, and Director at Google. "We look forward to collaborating with Agora in our goal to increase openness and interoperability of internet video."

Designed at the outset for hardware optimization, the AV1 specification, reference code, and bindings are available for toolmakers and developers to download here to begin designing AV1 into products. Specifically, the release of AV1 includes:

  • Bitstream specification to enable the next-generation of silicon

  • Unoptimized, experimental software decoder and encoder to create and consume the bitstream

  • Reference streams for product validation

  • Binding specifications to allow content creation and streaming tools for user-generated and commercial video

About Agora.io

Founded in 2014, Agora.io is a global company with offices in Santa Clara, London, Bangalore, and Shanghai and customers in over 100 countries. Agora.io offers a real-time engagement platform-as-a-service that allows developers to easily embed voice, video, interactive streaming, and messaging for any mobile, web or desktop application and go live globally in a matter of days.

With over 20 billion minutes of monthly usage on their network, Agora.io is trusted by developers and business managers and powers live streaming and video interaction for leading social and enterprise brands across the globe, with use cases in a wide variety of industries such as social, gaming, workflow collaboration, enterprise training & branding, e-commerce, healthcare and more. Agora.io services are backed by an SLA, priced very competitively, and GDPR compliant. For more information, please visit .

About the Alliance for Open Media

Launched in 2015, the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) was formed to define and develop media technologies to address marketplace demand for an open standard for video compression and delivery over the web. Board-level Founding Members include Amazon, Apple, Arm, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, NVIDIA, Samsung Electronics and Tencent. AOMedia's open-source, royalty-free, video codec AV1 is a significant milestone in the ability to deliver a next-generation video format that is interoperable, open, optimized for internet delivery and scalable to any modern device at any bandwidth. Visit or follow AOMedia on Twitter at [@a4omedia].

Media contacts:

AOMedia Jessie Hennion jhennion@virtualinc.com 781.876.6280

Agora.io Alexandria Plew agora@matternow.com 971.245.3616