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Royalty-Free MPEG Video Proposals Announced
theweatherelectric writes "Rob Glidden notes on his blog that MPEG has recently 'announced it has received proposals for a royalty-free MPEG standard and has settled on a deliberation process to consider them.' There are two tracks toward royalty-free video currently under consideration by MPEG. The first track is IVC, a new standard 'based on MPEG-1 technology which is believed a safe royalty-free baseline that can be enhanced by additional unencumbered technology described in MPEG-2, JPEG, research publications and innovative technologies which are promised to be subject to royalty-free licenses.' The second proposed track is WebVC, an attempt to get the constrained baseline profile of H.264 licensed under royalty-free terms. Rob Glidden offers an analysis of both proposals. Also of interest is Rob's short history of why royalty-free H.264 failed last time."
Frankly, I don't really see any problems with H.264 licensing either. There isn't any costs involved in streaming, playing or showing H.264 content. The only cost is with authoring tools which are sold for a good amount of money anyway, and there is nothing wrong with charging some small percentage of the sales income from them. It's very telling that no one else has managed to come up with technology as good as H.264 - not even Google - because it is really good codec. Those who made it deserve to be paid for its usage too, because developing such isn't cheap. It's not your usual geek just working out in parents basement, it needs lots of people working on salary. Those programmers need to be paid too.