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.

Re:And how are they supposed to measure this?

[psavo]

Better still. At least in Finland we have this thing called 'tv-license'. If you don't own one, you're not (legally) allowed to listen to the radio or watch TV (in your own appartment, casual hearing is *OK*).
This license is pretty hefty, but it funds 'state's tv station', which shows some very good programs, so I'm personally OK with that.
Of course we have ad-funded (did I mention that states tv-channel doesn't have ads?) channels too.

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.

Re:I hope MPEG-4 fails

[benwaggoner]

I'm the Ben Waggoner who was quoted in the article.

Actually, I wasn't saying it was TOO complex. While the entire standard certainly is complex, particular implementations only use a subset of those, based on a combination of Profiles and Levels.

The stuff most folks have been talking about, like the Simple Visual and Advanced Simple Visual used in the forthcoming QuickTime 6 and DivX 5.0 are only a really, really small part of the standard.

MPEG-4 is a big toolbox of features that can be used to build many different solutions, potentially competing or enhancing things like Flash, Shockwave, JPEG, streaming servers, movie projectors, video cameras, etcetera.

I view this as a real strength. Going forward anyone who needs to develop a new media tool can start with MPEG-4, instead of starting with scratch.

A good analogy would be how GNU and Linux are now a default port to all kinds of new and strange devices and tasks, because the building blocks are all there.

It's important that the open source community understand that building a real competitior to MPEG-4 is a task on the order of magnitude of building an OS from scratch.

Just being able to play a rectangular movie with audio isn't even scratching the surface.

Pay-per-view, pay-per-use, micropayments, etc.

[Shiny Metal S.]

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.

This pay-per-view crap won't work, for the same reason as other micropayment ideas. See The Case Against Micropayments, my emphasis:

(...)

Micropayment systems have not failed because of poor implementation; they have failed because they are a bad idea. Furthermore, since their weakness is systemic, they will continue to fail in the future.

Proponents of micropayments often argue that the real world demonstrates user acceptance: Micropayments are used in a number of household utilities such as electricity, gas, and most germanely telecom services like long distance.

These arguments run aground on the historical record. There have been a number of attempts to implement micropayments, and they have not caught on in even in a modest fashion - a partial list of floundering or failed systems includes FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, MicroMint and Cybercent. If there was going to be broad user support, we would have seen some glimmer of it by now.

Furthermore, businesses like the gas company and the phone company that use micropayments offline share one characteristic: They are all monopolies or cartels. In situations where there is real competition, providers are usually forced to drop "pay as you go" schemes in response to user preference, because if they don't, anyone who can offer flat-rate pricing becomes the market leader. (See sidebar: "Simplicity in pricing.")

Why have micropayments failed? There's a short answer and a long one. The short answer captures micropayment's fatal weakness; the long one just provides additional detail.

The Short Answer for Why Micropayments Fail

Users hate them.

(...)

Read the rest of this article, very good stuff. I won't ever use pay-per-view and any other micropayments. For the same reason as I prefer a flat fee for my DSL instead of pay-per-use fee for every email I send or every website I visit, etc.

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.

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.

Reply from MPEG4 Licensing Association

[frankie]

After the previous /. article about MPEG4, I wrote to licensing@mpegla.com and said "if you want Windows Media to win the streaming war, then keep the per-use fee". Much to my amazement, they sent back a reply that was actually relevant to my concerns. It wasn't the answer I wanted, but at least they have good form letters.

Received: from massive.mpegla.com ([12.41.161.2]) by mx2del.umbc.edu
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.0.4417.0
Subject: Your Recent Email
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 10:41:04 -0700
From: "MPEG-4 Visual Licensing" <MPEG-4VisualLicensing@mpegla.com>

Thanks for sharing your views with us regarding the reported MPEG-4 Visual licensing terms and your interest in using the MPEG-4 Visual Standard. I know this email may sound like a canned response, but since you took the time to write to us and others who wrote us raised similar concerns, we wanted to get back to you (and the others) to explain the situation. We understand that you have strong feelings about the MPEG-4 Visual licensing terms based on what you've heard, and we welcome your feedback. The license agreement is still in the process of being worked out, your views are important to us, and they will be taken into consideration. Similarly, I hope you will allow us this opportunity to clarify a few things that may have been misunderstood and to explain where this goes from here.

First, we would like to clarify the role of MPEG LA. MPEG LA's business is to make it possible for new technologies (like MPEG-4 Video) to enter the marketplace by making the essential intellectual property rights owned by many patent owners accessible to everyone on fair, reasonable, nondiscriminatory terms under a single license. If there were no MPEG LA, the essential patent rights that made the MPEG-4 Visual technology possible would still have to be dealt with, but instead of having the opportunity to deal with one company for a single license that includes those rights, users' only option would be to deal with each patent holder individually. With MPEG LA, the marketplace is assured of ready access to MPEG-4 Visual essential patents owned by 18 different companies (soon there will be more, but our goal is to include as many essential patents as possible in one license; therefore, royalty rates will not increase during the term of the agreement even as new patent owners and more patents are included). What you've seen is the first step in that process.

We understand that the success of a licensing program relies on the success of the underlying technology. Therefore, our goal, like yours, is to promote the widest possible use of the MPEG-4 Visual standard, and we are sensitive to the need to structure a reasonable license that is consistent with marketplace conditions. To that end, we continue to work with the patent owners to assure that the license is responsive. Everything is in a state of constant review. If something isn't right, every effort is made to fix it. Because of MPEG LA's role, you have the opportunity to discuss your concerns with us, and we in turn can communicate them to the patent owners. We note that there are many different views to be considered, however, and that ultimately the marketplace will decide. We note also that there may be many reasons (having nothing to do with licensing terms) why someone may delay a product introduction or choose among competing alternatives. And, it would be a mistake to assume that any alternative is or will be free of patent licensing obligations or without additional charges of its own.

Finally, we understand that you do not agree with the implementation of a use fee. Given the nature of MPEG-4 Visual technology and the importance of encouraging the wide availability of MPEG-4 Visual decoders and encoders in the market, the patent owners' intention was that reasonable royalties should be shared among industry participants across the entire product chain and applies equally to both wired and wireless services (especially as the ability to distinguish between them disappears). The philosophy underlying the use fee was intended to be consistent with the expected flow of MPEG-4 video transactions so that those who can pay will and those who can't aren't expected to: thus, the use royalties to be paid by service providers are tied to remuneration - if service providers or content providers are paid for offering or providing MPEG-4 video, then patent holders are paid for the use of their patents; if service providers or content providers are not paid for offering or providing MPEG-4 video, then patent owners are not paid for the use of their patents. The entire license including the use fee, its application to broadcast/cablecast/multichannel environments, etc., is under study and will be the subject of further discussion.

This is just the beginning. The licensing terms were just announced on January 31, and the details of the MPEG-4 Visual license agreement are still being worked out. Because of the challenge posed by the effort to produce a joint licensing program requiring a consensus among at least 18 different patent owners and the yet undetermined future implementations and applications of the emerging MPEG-4 Visual technology, this may take several months to complete. There will be much discussion before all of this is sorted out, and changes may be expected. Again, we appreciate your contribution to this process and will keep you informed.

Sincerely, Larry Horn Vice President, Licensing

Having Flashbacks of GIF

[ebresie]

Isn't this the whole thing that happen with the GIF format...someone started trying to make money off of it and then people started using jpeg, png,etc to overcome it.

Oh well, I guess in the end, they have to make money, but shouldn't it be up to the makers that implement the cost concerns and not the patent holders?

Actually, no...

[A_Non_Moose]

...would you prefer EVERYTHING be rendered on the fly?

I'd prefer it be rendered on a monitor, video screen or tv.

A fly is too small to render images on, IMO.