AVIF Commercial Use: Licensing and Royalty Terms

The AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) is an open, royalty-free image specification developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). This article outlines the specific licensing framework governing AVIF, the rights granted for commercial implementation and distribution, the defensive patent clauses involved, and the potential third-party patent considerations businesses must evaluate when adopting the format.

The AOMedia Patent License 1.0

AVIF derives its core image compression algorithms from the AV1 video codec's intra-frame capabilities. As an AOMedia project, AVIF is governed by the AOMedia Patent License 1.0 combined with the W3C Software and Document License for the specification itself. Under this framework:

• Royalty-Free Commercial Use: AOMedia members grant a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free patent license to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import, and distribute implementations of the AVIF specification.
• No Deployment Fees: There are no volume-based fees, subscription costs, or per-unit distribution charges for encoding or decoding AVIF images in hardware, software, or web services.

Defensive Patent Termination Clause

The AOMedia patent license includes a reciprocity condition known as a defensive termination clause. If a licensee initiates patent infringement litigation against any AOMedia contributor alleging that the AV1 or AVIF specification violates their patents, the complainant’s own royalty-free license to the AOMedia patent portfolio terminates immediately. This structure is designed to foster patent peace among all commercial adopters.

Container Format Licensing: MIAF and ISOBMFF

AVIF utilizes the Multi-Image Application Format (MIAF) specification (ISO/IEC 23000-22), which is built on top of the ISO Base Media File Format (ISOBMFF). While some proprietary image formats using ISOBMFF (such as HEIC) carry heavy patent encumbrances due to underlying HEVC licensing pools, AVIF avoids these fees by pairing the open ISOBMFF structural rules exclusively with royalty-free AV1-compressed payloads. The structural use of ISOBMFF within the parameters defined by AOMedia requires no additional royalty payments for commercial deployment.

Third-Party Patent Pools and Commercial Risk

Although AOMedia members (including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and Intel) have cross-licensed their patents royalties-free, AVIF is not immune to external patent assertions.

Independent licensing administrators, most notably the Sisvel AV1 Licensing Platform, claim that certain patents outside of the AOMedia consortium are essential to the AV1 compression technology used by AVIF. While AOMedia maintains that AV1 does not infringe these external patents and operates an AOMedia Defense Fund to assist certain ecosystem partners, commercial entities deploying AVIF at scale should be aware that third-party patent pool administrators actively seek to assert licensing claims over AV1-based technologies.