Wikipedia
Daala is a video coding format under development by the Xiph.Org Foundation under the lead of Timothy B. Terriberry mainly sponsored by the Mozilla Corporation. Like Theora and Opus, Daala is available free of any royalties and its reference implementation is being developed as free and open-source software.
Among at least three dozen other contributors there are also engineers from Google, Inc. and Cisco Systems. The name is taken from the female fictional character of Admiral Natasi Daala from the Star Wars universe.
The reference implementation is written in C and published, together with its source code, as free software under the terms of a BSD-like license. Software patents are being filed for techniques used in and developed for Daala. Those patents are freely licensed to everybody to use for any purpose. However, the patent holders reserve the right to use them to counter patent infringement lawsuits filed by others.
Since June 20, 2013, the development is accompanied by a series of sporadically published posts on the underlying technology on the website of the Xiph.Org Foundation. The Daala project is one of the collaborators in the IETF's NETVC project.