Challenge Caviar: Google is selling new royalty-free audio and video codecs

In a nutshell: The Alliance for Open Media will launch a brand new model to advertise a royalty-free audio-video expertise on client {hardware}, one thing Google has already achieved with the just lately adopted AV1 codec. Ought to Dolby fear concerning the new enterprise?

Google has a plan to compete with the newest and standard requirements for audio and video contents managed by Dolby, and it’s internally referred to as “Challenge Caviar.” Throughout a presentation held behind closed doorways for {hardware} producers, Caviar was described as a method to create a “more healthy, broader ecosystem” for premium media experiences with out royalties.

Challenge Caviar includes the already established Alliance for Open Media, a partnership between a few of the most essential know-how and media corporations (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung) and Google itself, selling the adoption of open supply and royalty-free audio-video codecs like AV1.

Dolby was by no means talked about throughout the confidential assembly, and but Google appears to have focused the San Francisco firm and its proprietary applied sciences as soon as extra. Challenge Caviar ought to convey a free different to 3D spatial audio (ie Dolby Atmos) and Dolby’s personal HDR commonplace for color-rich visible experiences (Dolby Imaginative and prescient).

Dolby Atmos and Dolby Imaginative and prescient have basically turn into the usual for high-end media consumption, both by way of a streaming service like Netflix or within the dwelling video area of interest with Blu-ray releases and residential theater gadgets. The ultimate worth of every certainly one of these merchandise features a price corporations pay to Dolby, to incorporate next-gen encompass sound and high-dynamic vary colours of their content material.

Challenge Caviar strives to chop down the aforementioned charges, whereas profitable assist from {hardware} producers on the similar time. Because of its YouTube ubiquitous video streaming service, Google has already achieved wonderful outcomes on this space with widespread {hardware} assist for the AV1 video codec, and now the corporate plans to strive once more with Dolby’s most up-to-date tech.

In contrast to AV1 and the “codec wars” of the previous years, nonetheless, this time there appears to be no discuss a brand-new audio or video know-how: Challenge Caviar would undertake already current codecs for each HDR and encompass sound content material whereas bringing a brand new, consumer-recognizable model available on the market on the similar time.