In this talk, we will present the argument in favor of an open source, royalty-free video codec that will keep pace with the evolution of video traffic. Additionally, we argue that the availability of a state-of-the-art, royalty-free codec levels the playing field, allowing small content owners and application developers to compete with the larger companies that operate in this space. This will ultimately result in a richer and more diverse internet. We will then introduce the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), a consortium with a lineup of tech giants including Google, Adobe, Amazon, AMD, Broadcom, Cisco, Google, Hulu, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, nVIDIA, Netflix, etc. 25+ board members, many of which own patent leading Internet companies. AOM is dedicated to developing open source, royalty free, new generational media formats, codecs and technologies. We will finally elaborate the showcase of YouTube which has increasingly heavily on VP9 - the direct ancestor of the AOM video codec.