More on MPEG4

ratajik writes: "Salon is running a story about how MPEG-LA (the alliance of companies in charge of licensing MPEG4) are planning on charging .25 cents for each copy they sell, and a .02 cent an hour "use fee" for anyone viewing MPEG4. They have a interesting slant on how this will make open-source alternatives much more attractive, and will likely kill off use of the MPEG4 standard in the long run."

Comments

Who is buying this?

[catwh0re]

I don't know about you, but everything that I find to be popular is popular because it is either free, or easy to pirate (free). I'd rather buy a DVD than pay for some software copy of it.

Re:Who is buying this?

[Bi()hazard]

One would wonder what the MPEG-4 people are thinking. This plan will obviously fail; how could high powered executives be so foolish? Have they been blinded by greed? Are they really that arrogant?

The answer is no. They are foolish like foxen: (a la boxen, if you people can use boxen as the plural of box then more than one fox is foxen, more than one sex is sexen, and a boxed set of lexx episodes is lexxen. Also, multiples of the often symbolic letter x are xen, which is pronounced like zen. Triple x-that is xxx-is therefore zen. Intriguing.) by coming out with outrageous terms now they hope to shock the market and take a highball negotiating position. MPEG-4 has enough support and technology to be the default choice. If they choose to compromise-sacrificing the time fees in exchange for acceptance of more legitimate fees, they win the negotiation now and prepare the playing field for future outrages. This ploy will be likely to work every time if it works once. Furthermore, smaller, more premium services will have greater freedom to choose per use and per hour fees if the big players take them seriously. The executives on MPEG-4 are not impartial: they serve other corporate masters. They are acting in the interests of their respective companies. They know MPEG-4 will become dominant after a negotiating process, so they feel secure in manipulating the situation to allow their own companies to bring up similar licensing terms and be taken seriously.

Do not underestimate the corporate elite. They gained their positions through long careers of stiff competition, rampant deception and hidden agendae, and ubiquitous backstabbing. These are masters of bs, people far more comfortable telling carefully crafted lies than the truth. They want to be underestimated. They want to provoke you. They are trolling to destabilize the market and create an opportunity to shift norms in their favor. And as long as the majority continues to use their products in the end, they will be successful.

And how are they supposed to measure this?

[Kymermosst]

How the hell are they going to measure "viewing time"? What if I sneeze and briefly aren't looking at the video, do they charge me for that?

Buncha bullcrap. I'm tired of this crap that tries to wring money out of you for time spent doing something. Subscription software, pay-per-minute viewing/listening, and the like.

What next, the state is going to charge me for every minute I'm on the freeway?

I've got an idea. Let's make a computer that charges me $.02/minute for as long as I'm sitting in front of it.

I just wish more people would get sick of this crap, and write their congressman as I have done. There are too many idiots out there who just miss everything as it goes on by.

I bet they care when they get thier first bill for per-minute charges of movie viewing. By then, it'll be too late.

Re:And how are they supposed to measure this?

[mcrbids]

What next, the state is going to charge me for every minute I'm on the freeway?

They already do. It's called "Gas tax" and is applied in most jurisdictions. Since you use a certain amount of gas per hour, and the size of the vehicle (roughly) determines how much gas you burn, you, in essence, pay a "pound per mile" price for driving down the highway.

Here in California, where gas prices are around $1.25 per gallon, over 1/2 of that cost is in the form of various taxes and fees.

I understand that ratio is considerably higher still in Europe.

I hope MPEG-4 fails

[markj02]

I agree with Ben Waggoner: MPEG-4 was designed by a large committee of industry experts and open source codecs don't have a prayer of reaching the complexity of MPEG-4. And you know what? That's a good thing.

MPEG-4 is a complete mess. It tries to be the next generation MPEG-2, flash, speech synthesis, content management, and a lot more things all rolled into one. And MPEG-4 tries to serve too many masters: software encoders and decoders, consumer electronics devices, industrial applications, multimedia databases, and others. If MPEG-LA prices MPEG-4 out of the market, we can all sigh a collective sigh of relief because the MPEG-4 standard just sucks. MPEG-4 would be a bad idea even if there were no licensing fees.

What we need is a simple, scalable video codec. It does not have to have any bells and whistles. All it needs to do is represent a video stream and a collection of audio streams together. It should get rid of the interlacing mess from MPEG-2, it should allow for video of different sizes, and maybe it should allow for the inclusion of user-defined synchronized byte streams, and that's about it.

Open source video codec developers do not have to worry about low-level hardware implementability (that only matters for cut-throat pricing on devices you don't really want to use anyway; anything else can get a general-purpose processor), they don't have to worry about making DVD manufacturers happy, and they don't need to squeeze the last 50% of compression out of their format (machines and disks are cheap). There are now plenty of well-documented research techniques for audio and video compression, some even with open source implementation, that open source developers can use.

So, no, nobody would be able to compete with MPEG-4. But what open source video codecs can deliver is a simple, reasonably efficient, scalable, easily implementable video codec. And that's a lot better than MPEG-4.

Re:I hope MPEG-4 fails

[t]

As someone who works with JPEG 2000 I have to call you on your misinformation. JPEG 2000 uses wavelets. Most all image codecs to date use some kind of DCT. The software implementations for the wavelet engines is not optimized, as would be expected for a pre-standard implementation meant to show functionality.

And also, JPEG 2000 is not a mammoth unusable standard. I've actually read the entire standard (the non-optional parts). It is small enough that a mere human can read it in a reasonable timeframe.

Also, what software were you talking about that is 4 times slower? The JPEG2000 VM? Jasper?

t.

Pay Per Minute for Non-Streaming Data

[Adrian Lopez]

Will users be charged for viewing MPEG4 content if streaming is not involved? I hope not. Getting users accustomed to paying for MPEG4 content regardless of how it's delivered is a small step away from getting users accustomed to paying usage fees for all content.

Furthermore

[Adrian Lopez]

If software manufacturers resort to metering use of MPEG4 codecs as a way to calculate license fees, monitoring viewing habits as an "unaviodable" side-effect is just a small step away.

Re:Yeah right!!

[CmdrTaco (editor)]

So are you telling me FF10 did not have pre-rendered MPEG-2 cutscenes? How about GTA3? Or MGS2? Surely they do not exclusively exist in console games. Nearly every computer game I have played has at least some movie content. The linear nature of RPG's is well suited for cutscene style presentation and MMORPG's are quite popular, although the technology is less appropriate for FPS.

Now, combine the amazing story of FF10 with the multiuser dimension of Everquest and tell me that wouldn't be an excellent application for MPEG-4.

MPEG4 will not make 3D graphics faster if used
Yes, but not every part of every game is 3D...

Yet Another Useless Initiative

[duvel2]

You'd think corporations would have learned some lessons by now.

Lessons like:

There is not one example where micropayments created a profit

People aren't gonna start paying for something that they can have for free and that they always used to have for free

You can't possibly expect that your product will be The Final® and that nobody will ever come up with an even better solution way before you've recouped your investments.

Until companies learn this, there will always be some initiative to try and make money of things that will never be profitable. We've seen this with JPG, where as a result a lot of websites are switching to PGN, and now we will see this again with MPEG4.

Face the facts: things need to be scarce in order to make money of them. E.g. you can't sell air when you're outdoors. You can sell air to a colony on mars or to scubadivers. Likewise: you can't sell digital content because it cannot be made scarce once it's accessible on a PC. Infinite copies can and will be made. And again for al the corporations out there that try to make money of patenting hyperlinks: Whatever you're patent is, it will be copied (or remade or rebuilt or re-engineered or ...) and you will loose the money you invested.

What do you get for the fees?

[mpsmps]

The first question I would ask about the licensing fees is whether MPEG4 provides enough added value to justify choosing it over the less expensive/free alternatives.

The quality doesn't appear to justify it. My experience with various mpeg video formats is that they are not better (and probably worse) than On2's open-source and (reasonably priced) commercial solutions. It is certainly worth forming your own opinion by checking out On2's demos at their website.

As the quality is not sufficiently better to achieve an ROI based on reduced bandwidth, what is MPEG counting on to entice people to pay their fees? Several possibilities (some mentioned in the article):

• Brand value. mpeg is much better known than the alternatives. This can be a powerful asset. I switched my long-distance from Qwest to PowerNet Global. There is no difference in quality because PNG uses Qwest's infrastructure, but I pay less than half as much as I did, but I realize a lot more people go with Qwest than PNG. In effect, the extra fees go to paying Qwest's marketing, which gives them more market share than the extra price costs them.
  
• Useful features in MP4. I have no idea what features MP4 has over VP3/4/5 that are not visible by viewing the demos on the web, but the article suggests there may be some.
  
• Patent muscle. This surprised me as On2 has been around for some time and once had a market cap of about $1 billion (I miss those days!). They could have sued them when they had the prospect of getting real money in a judgment, where now there is no prospect of getting money from them or the open-source alternatives. I suspect this implies they don't have much of a case.
  
• Negotiating strategy. I have been involved in quite a few enterprise-level business negotiations. Both sides often take extreme initial positions to give them room to negotiate. The belief is that if you begin with your best offer, you'll have to settle on something unacceptable. My experience suggests this is a rational negotiating strategy. The mpeg team is going to face tough negotiating with the major media companies and may feel they need some things they can give away. In this case, they will expect to end up reducing their fees but still be better off than if they had started with a more reasonable offer.
  

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Re:Funny, they were OK with $ for FireWire

[antijava]

Of course, you don't have to pay $0.02 for every hour your Firewire port is active. As I understand the MPEG4 licensing, this would be the analog of what they are trying to push on the market.

Re:Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

The OGG container format is designed for streaming (much like ASF) and not editing, so it apparently suffers from the same issues that have kept AVI on the scene.

There's some open source work to create an AVI replacement file format called TMF (the movie format?) that resolves things like the 2GB size problem and subtitles and so on. Anyway, I'm not clear on all the details or what exactly is wrong with OGG or the 'open' QuickTime file format, but there's some discussions on powerdivx.com if you are interested.

As far as "MSMPEG4 V3" (and V4) goes, maybe it's too half-assed to warrent the licence fees. DiVX is paying the licence fees with their new v5 codec, and you have to assume that MS has a backroom deal worked out (to the chagrin of Apple).