By Foo Yun Chee
BRUSSELS (Reuters) -The Alliance for Open Media (AOM), whose members include Alphabet unit Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta, on Tuesday dodged a possible fine after EU antitrust regulators closed an investigation into its video licensing policy.
The European Commission, which acts as the competition enforcer for the 27-country bloc, had been investigating alleged anti-competitive behaviour related to the licence terms of AOM’s new standard software for streaming called AV1 since last year.
“The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) welcomes the news that the European Commission has today closed its preliminary review of AOMedia’s royalty-free licensing policy without further action,” AOM said in a statement.
“Royalty-free licensing forms a foundational element for technological standards and the open internet, fostering innovation, choice and competition in the interests of businesses and consumers in the European Union and worldwide,” it said.
The Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
AV1 is an open, royalty-free video coding software designed for video transmission over the internet, and is used by Netflix and YouTube as well as Google Chrome and Firefox.
Other AOM members are Netflix, Broadcom, Cisco, Tencent, Intel, Huawei, Mozilla, Samsung and Nvidia.
Companies face fines of as much as 10% of their global turnover for breaching EU antitrust rules.
(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; editing by Jason Neely)
