MPEG LA Extends H.264 Royalty-Free Period

Sir Homer writes "The MPEG LA has extended their royalty-free license (PDF) for 'Internet Video that is free to end users' until the end of 2016. This means webmasters who are registered MPEG LA licensees will not have to pay a royalty to stream H.264 video for the next six years. However the last patent in the H.264 portfolio expires in 2028, and the MPEG LA has not released what fees, if any, it will charge webmasters after this 'free trial' period is over."

Comments

Re:Data transfer?

[sakdoctor]

Software patents? That's just absurd.

Nice

[jvkjvk]

What a charming business model.

Oh well, I guess webmasters could have always used something else, right?

It's particularly nice that web masters are giving billing information 6 years early, so the company doesn't have to do much to track down the first round of suck^H^H^H^H customers to bill them for use.

There's nothing like getting your IP embedded deeply into everyones processes (with their complete acknowledgement of that fact) and then seeking rent against the cost of changing it.

I would expect that many companies don't have migration plans in place, I don't know, not my business.

Regards.

Re:Nice

[slim]

In 6 years time, there'll be an awful lot of iPhones/iPads (and their descendants) in the wild.

Expect H.264, and maybe some other patent-encumbered standards, to be the only video format a web site can use in order to be viewed on these devices.

The options for video websites in 2016? Pay up, or abandon iPhone/iPad users. Plus who knows how many other closed platforms.

SS H.264 submarine patent

[denis-The-menace]

2010: DIVE! DIVE!
It's free, come and get it

2016: Up periscope. Look there's someone using it without paying the $799/Stream licensing fee.
-Arm MPEG LAwyer Torpedoes, FIRE!

looks like a ambush in slow-motion.

And even if sucked

[DrYak]

You know, Theora video doesn't suck.

And even if it sucked, that wouldn't matter anyway :
most of video today consist of short snips on social websites of dancing cats filmed with a camera phone with crappy sensors and low quality MJPEG compression.

Arguing that Theora would need more bits to achieve the same quality as other codec is akin to arguing that Youtube should spend more bits to be better faithful to all the compression artifacts.
Theora opponents say that, for the same bits bandwidth, Theora video is blurrier. I'm saying that this blur won't hide any critical detail. It will only blur out the noise from the camera phone's crappy sensor and from the MJPEG'S 50% compression. I personally *can* live without them, if it is what it takes to have a open free/libre standard.

Re:And even if sucked

[delt0r]

At the lower bit rate end of the spectrum Theora is not bad, and would be competitive if it had the same development effort that the "Open Source" H.264 codec encoders get. Personally I think both theora and h.264 look like complete crap at you tube bandwidths.

However Theora is working. Its mere existence is forcing MPEG LA to address license concerns. If Theora wasn't around, we would even be having a serious "open codec" debate, we be asking how much is licensing html 5.0 going to cost.

Re:And even if sucked

[TheRaven64]

most of video today consist of short snips on social websites of dancing cats filmed with a camera phone with crappy sensors and low quality MJPEG compression.

By volume, sure. By amount of time people spend watching? I'm not so sure. The two places I mainly stream videos from are iPlayer and the company I rent DVDs from. Both of these have DVD-quality or better sources. YouTube comes a distant third after these two. These aren't short clips, they're episodes of TV shows or films, so 30 minutes is about the minimum length and 45 minutes to two hours is fairly common.

Tried & True business model...

[PPalmgren]

The first hit is free.

Re:A lot of fallout

[onefriedrice]

However this is a really plain-as-day example of how patent trolls are ruining business for everyone.

Please don't dilute the term "patent troll." It has a specific meaning and certainly doesn't apply to a patent pool packager like MPEG-LA. Everybody adopted h.264 with full knowledge that it was covered by several patents. This is certainly not a case of some junk firm patenting prior art and suing everybody. Nobody coerced anyone into using h.264; it just happened to actually be a good codec, so it was adopted by the industry. Nor is it "ruining business for everyone," so I'm not even sure what your point is. Your own anecdotal evidence doesn't lead to this conclusion.

Is it disappointing that we didn't have a comparable patent-free codec at the time when people started adopting h.264? Yeah, it's too bad. Unfortunately, no amount of sour grapes is going to change what happened.