Kingsoft Cloud Joins the Alliance for Open Media

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BEIJING, China – July 19, 2018 – Kingsoft Cloud, one of the world's leading cloud computing service providers, today announced that it has joined the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) as a Promoter member. AOMedia is a non-profit organization formed by the world's best-known leaders in video with the aim to define and develop media technologies that address the need for an open standard for video compression and delivery over the web.

Known for its award-winning video codec software, Kingsoft Cloud provides one-stop cloud service solutions, such as live video and short video applications, for 90 percent of leading game publishers and content providers (CP) in China. As a technology innovator, Kingsoft Cloud's goal is to continuously improve the user experience. In addition to offering superior cloud computing service products including codec, software development kit (SDK), and content delivery network (CDN) solutions for gaming, video, and other vertical industries, Kingsoft Media will collaborate with AOMedia members to pursue the advancement and adoption of the open and royalty-free AOMedia Video codec, AV1.

"Kingsoft Cloud is excited to join AOMedia. Given our dedication to providing unmatched video quality and lower delivery costs across the cloud's video delivery infrastructure, we look forward to working alongside AOMedia members to deliver AV1 royalty-free, cross-platform, online video to industries worldwide," said YiFeng Qian, co-partner of Kingsoft Cloud.

The availability of AV1, AOMedia's open-source video codec, is a significant industry milestone – 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 excited to welcome Kingsoft Cloud to the Alliance for Open Media," said Matt Frost, AOMedia Founding Board Member and Head of Strategy and Partnerships at Google. "Improving streaming quality for online video has always been one of Kingsoft Cloud's top priorities. We look forward to Kingsoft Cloud's contributions to this significant initiative, which will open the door to a new era of online video made possible by the next-generation video format AV1."

Designed at the outset for hardware optimization, the AV1 specification, reference code, and bindings are available for tool makers 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 the Alliance for Open Media

Launched in 2015, the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) formed to define and develop media technologies to address marketplace demand for an open standard for video compression and delivery over the web. Founding Members include Amazon, Apple, Arm, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, and NVIDIA. AOMedia is a Joint Development Foundation Projects, LLC series. The Joint Development Foundation is an independent nonprofit organization that provides the corporate and legal infrastructure to enable groups to establish and operate standards and source code development collaborations. Visit www.aomedia.org or follow AOMedia on Twitter at @a4omedia.

About Kingsoft Cloud

Kingsoft Cloud, a unit of Kingsoft Group, is one of the world's leading cloud computing service providers and among China's top three cloud computing companies. Founded in 2012, the company has data centers and branch offices around the globe, including Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Hong Kong and North America. Kingsoft Cloud has a complete product portfolio covering cloud server, cloud physical host, relational database, cache, tabular database, object storage, load balancing, VPN, CDN, hosted Hadoop, cloud security and cloud DNS etc. as well as cloud-based solutions for vertical industries, including game, video, government administration, medical services, financial services. With a strong commitment to artificial intelligence research and applications, Kingsoft Cloud has launched Kingsoft AI Propeller (KAP) that supports IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and industry solutions. To learn more about Kingsoft Cloud, please visit http://en.ksyun.com/ (English) or https://www.ksyun.com/ (Chinese).