The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) has welcomed its newest promoter member. Chinese device manufacturer Oppo will collaborate with AOMedia, which aims to influence how the media ecosystem drives content creation, content provision, media delivery and consumption, as well as video compression.
Having an OEM onboard AV1’s standardization body is a neat victory for AOMedia, as it may stall some of the sceptics that argue AV1 has a limited future in hardware. Oppo is perhaps best known for its mobile handsets, which is an area where AOMedia desperately needs to cement and expand AV1.
It also demonstrates the growing appetite of Chinese companies to be involved in codec standardization. China has often been viewed as a wildcard, both in the development and adoption of international codecs, but this is changing. Chinese companies have been heavily involved in the IP that is driving VVC, the 8K-ready eventual successor to HEVC, and this week’s news is another sign that AV1 is of interest to Chinese companies other than Tencent.
While AV1 decoders are in a smattering of devices, HEVC is now in pretty much every new phone and PC, as well as most new set tops. AOMedia is all too aware of this, and the desire to expand the hardware footprint of AV1 is strong.
Only a handful of mobile chips support the codec, and even though Apple is an AOMedia member, none of its devices support AV1 hardware decoders. One could certainly wonder whether the same will apply to Oppo? There is a good chance that this membership announcement will not necessarily lead to AV1 integration any time soon.
AOMedia has confirmed that Oppo will play a leadership role in shaping the open and interoperable media streaming standards that power video on the web – in other words, codec development. The company has five research institutes and five R&D centers across the globe. Oppo also hosts video offerings in its smart TV and software products, and brings experience delivering video in mobile, OTT and cloud video environments.
This marks another step forward for AV1 as of late. Just last week we reported that Canada’s NetInt Technologies had announced what it claims is the first commercially available hardware AV1 encoder design. Designed for the data center, NetInt’s ASIC was looking to tap nascent demand for AV1. Qualcomm is one example of a high-profile OEM that has snubbed AV1’s claims of being royalty free.
However, AOMedia does seem to be playing a game of catch-up. Compared with the roll-out of HEVC, this hardware encoder has taken yonks to arrive – two to three years (depending on how you count it) from standardization, as oppose to HEVC’s encoders arriving in the same year as standardization.
While Chinese companies have historically sat out of international cooperation on codec development, the past five years has seen this change dramatically. The country has often been shrouded in mystery and technologically islanded, and in the case of codecs, has hosted its own Audio Video Coding Standard (AVS), which has made little headway elsewhere.
However, China has had to get involved at the standardization stage to protect itself from bloody battles over intellectual property in the future. If a Chinese OEM holds a patent portfolio of its own, it can severely reduce, or perhaps even reverse, the infringement tolls when entering a foreign market.
Chinese companies were barely involved in the 2013 standardization of HEVC, but now make up around 50% of the approved and incorporated standard contribution share of VVC. Huawei holds 12.95% of the patent share, which is over 3 times larger than what it held for HEVC, while Bytedance, which was not involved in HEVC at all, holds 9.33%.
While the complicated nature of patent ownership means that not every single VVC patent holder is accounted for in these percentages, and therefore they should be taken with a pinch of salt, you still get an idea for the rapidly shifting landscape.
There is a hesitance among OEMs to jump aboard AOMedia and support AV1. On the one hand, the promise of integrating a codec without harboring royalty costs is incredibly attractive, while the future of AV1’s royalty free status is far from uncertain. Sisvel is the mouthpiece for all those that are crying foul play, and it is certainly getting louder.
There are two questions here, one easier to answer than the other. Are AOMedia’s top dogs – Netflix, Google, Mozilla, Intel, Microsoft, to name a few – willing to pay whatever it takes to keep any patent infringement lawsuits under the table? Most likely, yes. But will mountains of cash alone be enough to keep the peace? Possibly not.
Either way, the limited range of mobile hardware support for AV1 has provided easy ammunition for its critics, of which there are many. Mediatek launched its Dimensity 1000 5G SoC supporting AV1 in April 2020, while Rockchip had launched the AV1-supporting RK3588 back in April 2019, although it remains unclear if any handsets have adopted it. That is all we are aware of, and of course Qualcomm snubbed AV1 in its recently released Snapdragon 888, although we were told at the time that future designs would support it.
So, welcoming Oppo to AOMedia gives at least a tiny bit of confidence to AV1’s chances in the handset game. According to research from Counterpoint, Oppo smartphones have held a 16% market share in China over the past year, down from 18% in Q3 of 2019.