Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Others Form 'Alliance For Open Media'
BrianFagioli tips news that Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Intel, Amazon, and Netflix are teaming up to create the Alliance for Open Media, "an open-source project that will develop next-generation media formats, codecs and technologies in the public interest." Several of these companies have been working on this problem alone: Mozilla started Daala, Google has VP9 and VP10, and Cisco just recently announced Thor. Amazon and Netflix, of course, are major suppliers of online video streaming, so they have a vested interested in royalty-free codecs. They're inviting others to join them — the more technology and patents they get on their side, the less likely they'll run into the issues that Microsoft's VC-1 and Google's VP8 struggled with. "The Alliance will operate under W3C patent rules and release code under an Apache 2.0 license. This means all Alliance participants are waiving royalties both for the codec implementation and for any patents on the codec itself."
Somehow I expect something named "Alliance For Open Media" to turn into some hideous new DRM scheme that clutch your gonads in fists of iron. With age comes incredible cynicism.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I doubt it.
These companies have tons of video-related patents - they had a big stake in the h264 patent pool, but are conspicuously missing from the list of h265 patent holders. And while the patents will be freely licensed to anyone, the license will allow the alliance to go nuclear on anyone that tries to sue for patent infringement. h265 is an upgrade to h264, so it is very likely it infringes on many of the alliance patents.