Open Video refers to the open source tools, media or processes that help make digital video production, distribution and access more universal.

Tools such as FFMPG have long underpinned many recording, transcoding and streaming video & audio applications, while the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) emerged to support industry frameworks such as Pixar’s OpenTimeline and OpenColour. These join an ever-growing suite of open editors and utilities, like kdenlive, Olive, Shotcut, Kit Scenarist, Wonder Unit’s  Storyboarder, and Blender. There’s also open Digital Asset Managers like ResourceSpace and Phrasanet.

Open source video includes public domain videos – whose copyright has expired or been lifted, and works actively licensed under a number of Creative Commons licenses. Archive.org lists 7.1 million public domain videos, including many early Hollywood classics, while there are over 8.8 million Creative Commons videos on Vimeo, a growing number on Flickr, and Wikimedia Commons, – and many more on YouTube — as well as specialist libraries and archives including OpenImages, Pond5, Europeana, Pexels, Pixabay and VideVo.

Until Apple ditched Adobe’s proprietary Flash Player from the iPhone in 2010, there was a push for open video coadecs, such as Ogg and WebM, and later WebRTC and SRT for streaming. The Participatory Culture Foundation created a decentralised architecture with Broadcast Machine and Miro Player separating video host and playback – but centralised services dominated. In 2017 PeerTube launched offering federated hosting & playback, enabling smaller spaces to moderate and curate.