Apple Delays QuickTime 6 Over Proposed MPEG-4 Licenses

znu writes: "Apple announced at the QuickTime Live! conference today that there's a public preview of QuickTime 6 with full MPEG-4 support ready to ship, but the terms of the proposed MPEG-4 license are holding it back. For those who haven't been following this, MPEG wants $0.25 per encoder/decoder for MPEG-4, up to $2 million per company per year. Apple is fine with that. But MPEG also wants content distributers to pony up $0.02/hour for any content that's distributed for profit. Apple feels that determining just what is "for profit" will be problematic, and that this pricing will seriously inhibit MPEG-4 adoption. You are encouraged to complain to MPEG LA about this situation."

Comments

Re:Its a good thing

[90XDoubleSide]

The "official" version of DivX ;-) (the one that the company that makes the playa owns) is no longer open source, so there's no reason they can't start charging for the encoding tools sometime in the future (almost no one can get away with charging for a decoder). DivX ;-) and the forthcoming Ogg Tarkin may be excellent codecs (more so the latter), but try to face the fact that the big-name content is going to be in big-name codecs, so if we can get a patented standard, it is better than having patented, undocumented formats.

Why wouldn't the TV model work on the net?

[NanoGator]

It seems to me that nickle and diming the customers on a per-stream basis for what they download is a very quick way to kill VoD on the internet. Seems like the Television Network approach would be much better suited. "This content comes from our sponsors."

Then they can go as far as to order merchandise for that show. "Click here to purchase a Transformers: Robots in Disguise Optimus Prime Toy for your kids." The can reward me for watching commercials. "Click now and we'll give you $1.00 off your next burger." They can even do things like broadcast a show live, just like TV does today for free. But if you want to see earlier episodes, you have to pay for a subscription to access them.

The idea of saying 'your time on the net is metered' scares me. Using the Internet for entertainment is a luxury, not a need. If the market thinks the price is unfair, then programs like Morpheus will suddenly reign supreme.

Re:Why wouldn't the TV model work on the net?

[Oink.NET]

It seems to me that nickle and diming the customers on a per-stream basis for what they download is a very quick way to kill VoD on the internet. Seems like the Television Network approach would be much better suited. "This content comes from our sponsors."

You're paying for your content, one way or the other. One is with your time (watching commercials), the other is with your money.

People are used to paying for content by putting up with commercials, and after you get used to it, it hardly seems like it costs you much at all. But once you make it easy enough for people to ditch the commercials entirely, you can bet many will do that. Putting content on the internet makes it that much easier for people to ditch the commercials, thereby devaluing the amount the networks get paid for each ad.

There are at least two different ways to respond to this problem: 1) pay-per-view, or 2) make sure it's not easier to ditch the commercials. Which method do you think will cost the networks more to implement and enforce?

Until they can come up with a streaming protocol that makes you sit through the ads (either through ingenious new technology, or more likely though a half-baked, legally enforced "can't break this or else" protocol), you will probably see more of these pay-per-view strategies, since they are otherwise at a loss for how to keep making the same kind of profit off their content in this new medium.

Re:but aren't we already using mpeg4?

[MiTEG]

The previous release of DiVX was based on a hacked version of the MS MPEG-4 (actually an interesting story, I believe it originated in a beta version of a MS media encoder program that had MPEG-4 encoding support, but was later removed in the final version). The major issue with this was the fact that it was done without any licensing, meaning the entire DiVX format was illegal. That being said, paying the royalties per encoder or hour of commercial video distributed was the least of the developer's concerns. This with was fixed with the new Open DiVX/DiVX 4.0+ which supposedly were completely re-written and NOT based on the original MPEG-4, therefore bypassing the licensing technicalities. Although the original DiVX 3.11 is still much better than the newer versions, OpenDiVX is open source.

Anyway, divx.com says "DivX is the most widely distributed MPEG-4 compatible", which I take to mean it is similar to MPEG-4 but is a completely different codec.

I could be wrong, but that's what I've gathered from what I've read on the web. If anyone knows more about this, feel free to correct me.

Re:Greedy bastards!

[Shiny Metal S.]

Remember that even 1/100 of cent per codec makes it impossible to implement as free software. If you write a free software encoder and ten milions of people will start using it, will you just pay $2.5M to MPEG-4 guys, begging people to stop using it in more copies?

If free like free beer, you're right.
If free like free speech, you're not.

When I say free software I usually mean free software .

If the program is gratis (like free beer) but it's not a free software, it can be possible to control how many people are using it, so you can control how much money you have to pay to MPEG people. But if it's a free software, you can't control how many people are using it.

So I suppose, you wanted to say:

If free like free speech, you're right.
If free like free beer, you're not.

which is exaclty right. We already have proprietary Quicktime or Windows Media players to download for free. Apple and Microsoft can pay $2M/year for MPEG-4 but if they don't want to, they can always offer a fixed number of copies to download, forcing you ro gegister. But people making a free software movie player, can't force such restrictions.

Re:Greedy bastards!

[Cadre]

We already have proprietary Quicktime

If you mean proprietary as in fully documented (you probably want to start in the API section) and open you'd be correct. In fact, there are several projects started that will play Quicktime movies fine under Linux.*

Perhaps you meant the proprietary and closed Sorenson codec?

*Of course, they won't be able to play the ones that use the Sorenson codec, which is the most popular codec to use with Quicktime

Apple: Go open...

[supabeast!]

So I'm wondering... why doesn't Apple just dump mpeg4 and spend less money support vorbis/tarkin? Developing a free, open-sourced video format would only be good for Apple, probably save Apple money, and hell, Apple is already doing Open Source work with OS X.

Re:Apple: Go open...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to break it to you, but Apple would no sooner produce an open source streaming format than Microsoft would. Their goal is to dominate the market for multimedia so that they can leverage it to increase their marketshare in other areas. Apple's forays into Open Source are not done to help anyone but themselves. They push Open Source when it is convienient (basing OS X on Mach+BSD), and shaft Open Source when it is not (refusing to port QT to anything besides Win+Mac despite the significant demand for it).

Re:Apple: Go open...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple does not believe that vorbis/tarkin are better on the intellectual property rights front than MPEG-4 is. With MPEG-4, the patent holders and IP claims are known. All we know about vorbis/tarkin is that we do not know if (when?) someone will come along and claim they hold patents on it and win. Think about what happened with UNISYS and GIF files. The impression I get from video people is that all of the useful techniques have been patented.