The Problem With Standards Is that There Are So Many To Choose From

The establishment of the Alliance for Open Media was announced yesterday.  Given the list of heavy hitters involved, it will be interesting to see the result.  One of two things will occur — something big or nothing. 

Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix are all involved.  At least half of this group is already invested in an existing or developing royalty free media codec.  Are they just involved to protect their existing investment, or are they committed to working toward a solution that standardizes the industry?

The saying that I first heard over a decade ago still brings chuckles, but rings true.

The Problem With Standards Is that There Are So Many To Choose From

There are dozens of codecs today, including some popular ones.  These include MP4 and H.264.  The acceptance of 4K video has generated a following for H.265 recently.  To complicate things, Microsoft and Apple push their own WMV and MOV formats, which are essentially wrappers for other codecs.  So why do we need another?

In order to achieve mass adoption, the Alliance for Open Media needs to meet these three criteria: 

1. The resulting codec needs to be royalty-free, encouraging all media player devices, applications and supporting operating systems to support the standard.
2. Compression needs to be excellent and high quality, and support both streaming and local file playback.
3. The standardized codec needs to be backward compatible to some degree to leverage existing devices and platforms that could quickly adopt the standard in a "land grab".

Dozens of industries could be directly affected by this.  While small, as compared to consumer product and service, I'm particularly interested in how this may affect the digital signage space.  Since there are good codecs available today, the biggest motivator for me to change will be compression and compatibility with existing devices.

Now we wait.