That would likely be the only potential obstacle for AV1 when it comes to becoming the 'de facto' standard video codec. The video encoding patents are many, an

That would likely be the only potential obstacle for AV1 when it comes to becoming the 'de facto' standard video codec. The video encoding patents are many, and of course written to be as broad as possible. That said, AV1 will be built on VP10, which is the last of the VPX series of codecs, which in turn have been royalty free for their entire existence (VP7-VP10), to this we can add h264 functionality which are covered by Cisco patents (a core member of AOM) and some features from Daala which are considered non-patented. Hopefully the AOM consortium has done their due diligence, and thus will be able to effectively fight patent litigation threats which will most likely occur, what speaks in favour of this are the impressive lineup of AOM, with Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Netflix, Amazon, Intel, AMD, ARM, Broadcom, etc, many of which own patents related to video encoding, as well as a very strong motivation to rid themselves of video royalties once and for all, both regarding distribution and hardware implementation. >(I absolutely hate that this is something I'm worried about) You and me both. We have great royalty free audio codecs (FLAC, OPUS), good enough royalty free image codec (JPEG, could potentially be replaced by a superior royalty free codec based upon AV1), it would be great if we could have the same for video as well.