Apple very quietly slipped its membership application to royalty-free video compression group the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) at the turn of the year. This is simply a practical step. It will no doubt take about five years for all devices to support AV1, for its performance claims to be borne out and for the royalty free element to be guaranteed. That means that for Apple, a company that likes to take control of all its key architectures, it is time to develop some influence in the enemy camp. It is only from inside this camp that Apple can assert its own patents in compression, but being so late into this game, we would suggest that Apple’s claim to own…