The governing members of the Alliance for Open Media are Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Google, Huawei, Intel, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent.

[6] In May 2015, the Internet Video Codec working group (NetVC) of the IETF was officially started and presented with coding techniques from Daala.

[7] Cisco Systems joined forces and offered their own prototype format Thor to the working group on July 22.

In 2018, the founder and chairman of the MPEG acknowledged the Alliance to be the biggest threat to their business model, furthermore stating that:[17] Alliance for Open Media has occupied the void created by MPEG’s outdated video compression standard (AVC), absence of competitive [royalty free] standards (IVC) and unusable modern standard (HEVC)... Everybody realises that the old MPEG business model is now broke.Articles suggested that Google was in planning to release 2 open formats, High-dynamic-range video/HDR video and 3D audio, as alternatives to Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision video technology.

Although the name is yet to be disclosed, the announcement was made public through a journal authored by AOMedia developers and biographies shared on the doc: and after a month papers calls were released with an early draft.

In June 2022, 10 universities and 24 organizations (companies) went to Alliance for Open Media Symposium,[20] with various engineers working on AV1 and developing the new technologies in the cwg incubators gains test for the Next Generation AOM standard.

[29] The format is the primary contender for standardisation by the video coding standard working group NetVC of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

AV1 is specifically designed for real-time applications and for higher resolutions than typical usage scenarios of the current generation (H.264) of video formats.

[31] In 2019, Sisvel International formed a patent pool for selling licenses to intellectual property it anticipates will be necessary to comply with the AV1 standard.

[32] The Alliance is incorporated in the US as a tax-exempt non-profit organization and a subsidiary "project" of the independent Joint Development Foundation (JDF), also headquartered in Wakefield.

Several AOM members have previously worked on MPEG's HEVC and hold patents to it (e.g. BBC, Intel, Cisco, Vidyo, Apple, Microsoft, and Broadcom[36]).