Apple has agreed to join the Open Media Alliance, a consortium of tech companies including Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft that is working on a new compression technology to make online video streaming and downloading use less data. The group was formed back in 2015 around a new video codec initiative that ultimately resulted in AV1, a next-generation video compression technology that could be used to push media files to all sorts of devices. Apple’s participation came quietly with a change on the Open Media Alliance’s website today, noted first by CNET.

The goal of the Open Media Alliance was to unify the industry around a new, more cohesive standard. It was also to avoid an increasingly messy royalty fee arrangement with…

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