Talk:Alliance for Open Media

Uncovering more and more founding members?

AOMedia's homepage presents some seemingly contradictory information:

• Their own press release from September 2015 lists 7 founders (Google, Cisco, Mozilla, Microsoft, Intel, Netflix, Amazon).
• According to the About Us page, current founders now include ARM, IBM and Nvidia, in addition to the 7 original founders.
• ARM and Nvidia joined early, but IBM's logo just recently appeared on the member listing on the About Us page. Another source indicates IBM joined around the same time as Hulu.[1]

Creds for the historic account: Swedish Ubuntu Forum —84.208.177.88 (talk) 20:03, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Facebook has joined as a founding member. If you can join as a "founding member", after the organization was founded, then that clearly can't imply being a member from the beginning. Fair enough: "founding member" is just AOM speek for some level-of-membership thingy they have. But that's not to say we should blindly let AOM's bad naming skills redefine the vocabulary used on Wikipedia: We should clarify this distinction, use unambiguous wording throughout, and in the infobox, "founding member" should mean "member from the beginning", as any reader unfamiliar with the subject would assume. 84.208.177.88 (talk) 11:44, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Request for Feedback

Hi. My name is Brandon Cheung and I work for Qualcomm, an IP company. The current page has some bias language and factual errors that feel designed to promote AOM's mission while attacking companies that want to be paid for developing intellectual property. I have two specific suggestions I'm hoping an impartial volunteer editor will consider, pursuant to WP:COI:

Request 1: Erroneous criticisms of MPEG

Current article text: "Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and its related business model of exploiting intellectual property through patent royalties associated with patent and licensing complications and fees" Explanation: The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) does not "exploit" intellectual property or even sell any patent licenses. MPEG develops standards. It is a working group founded by the non-governmental organization International Organization for Standardization and the standards body International Electrotechnical Commission. Some of the cited articles[2][3] correctly state that a business called MPEG LA is one of the largest licensors of the IP necessary under the MPEG standard. However, none of the cited sources discuss "complications" or "exploiting" IP, nor say that MPEG itself is profiteering from its standards work. Suggestion: I suggest the following trim to fix the run-on sentence and remove the editorialized/incorrect statement in the introduction: "It uses the ideas and principles of open web standard development to create video standards that can serve as royalty-free alternatives to the hitherto dominant standards of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and its related business model of exploiting intellectual property through patent royalties associated with patent and licensing complications and fees"

Request 2: "Free" as debate, not fact

Current article text: The Wikipedia page mentions "free" 17 times without ever mentioning doubts as to whether the standard will really be free. Explanation: This article does a great job summarizing the debate/issues. It says the Alliance for Open Media "promised to offer the codecs royalty free" but companies like Sisvel are already setting up to the be the patent licensor to support purchasing the IP that will likely be necessary under the standard. Alliance for Open Media argues patent holders are motivated to donate free IP to the standard, whereas Sisvel and others say Alliance for Open Media won't be able to develop a standard that doesn't require paying the developers of the associated IP. Suggestion: Add a summary of the debate from the article I provided and trim/correct promotional language that depicts AOM's promises as fact, such as: "its royalty-free licensing terms and state of the art performance". I can propose more specific content if a more neutral editor doesn't want to take it on.

Thank you in advance for taking a look. Best regards. Lcfbrandon (talk) 17:15, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

I think your proposed changes are accurate, specially the MPEG part. The licensing issues for AV1 are also worth mentioning, and yes this article needs promotional material removed. Pancho507 (talk) 19:50, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay getting to this.

I have fulfilled request 1 exactly. This isn't the place to criticize MPEG especially considering that statement is not well supported in the body or citations.

I have done other edits to address the "free" issue and associated NPOV. It would be good still to have some more comprehensive aspiration vs. reality licensing discussion based on the source provided by Lcfbrandon. ~Kvng (talk) 15:32, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Kvng:. I went ahead and created a summary of the "free" debate based on the citation given, per our discussion:

"In 2019, Sisvel International formed a patent pool for selling licenses to intellectual property it anticipates will be necessary to comply with the Alliance for Open Media's AV1 standard. The Alliance for Open Media said this was contrary to its goal of a standard developed entirely with free, donated technology owned by the organization. Sisvel said it anticipates AV1 will need patents developed for-profit in order to succeed, despite the the Alliance for Open Media's aspirations.""

I think the "AOMedia Video" section would be a good place for it.

 Done [4] ~Kvng (talk) 15:43, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

There's also a missed, unqualified "free" reference in the "Operation and structure" section:

"The Alliance will intends to release new video codecs as free software under the BSD 2-Clause License."

 Done [5] ~Kvng (talk) 15:43, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

There's about 10+ citations to the organization's own website: aomedia.org. However, I won't get that involved, beyond the "free" issue. Thanks for helping out! Lcfbrandon (talk) 20:07, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

References