Breaking Open the Video Frontier, Despite MPEG-LA

JimLynch writes "Did you know that nearly every video produced for Web viewing has been, at one point or another, in MPEG format no matter in what format the video is ultimately saved? According to Chris 'Monty' Montgomery, nearly every consumer device outputs video in MPEG format. Which means that every software video decoder has to have MPEG-licensed technology in order to process/edit video." An interesting snippet: "But there's hope on the horizon. Besides the codecs and formats from the Xiph.Org Foundation, the new WebM format announced by Google in May will ideally provide consumers and developers with another alternative. Montgomery has thrown Xiph.Org support behind WebM, because Google's financial muscle (not to mention their free license) will have a real chance to break the hold MPEG-LA has on the market."

Comments

Re:The Snowball's Chance In Hell.

[Anonymous Coward]

At the moment H.264 licensing is dirt cheap.

Shorts 12 minutes and under are free for now.

Retail sales by title - disk or download - is the lessor of 2% of sales or 2 cents each. They currently don't give a damn about your hometown wedding videos. What they want to see is a check for $20 grand.

Subscription sales - you owe nothing unless your cable channel or DVD of the month has 100,000 subscribers (for now). It doesn't matter whether they are paying $15 for an hour of Penthouse or 5 cents a week for Miniature Golf until they decide to charge a percentage of what you make on the video.

Fixed those for you.