Ever since the AV1 codec was conceived around 2015 as a successor to VP9, industry experts have been highly skeptical of the technology’s royalty free assurances. Three years later, the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) launched AV1 onto the video scene in disruptive fashion, but it wasn’t long before patent licensing programs emerged on intellectual property management website Sisvel – and in recent weeks that has evolved into a fully-fledged AV1 patent pool. Fundamentally, the building blocks for video have remained the same for three decades; the product of extensive cross-industry collaboration and patent sharing. Such codec R&D does not come investment-free and so hounding the idea of a royalty-free codec was always an almost impossible mission for AOMedia –…