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MPEG Founder Says the MPEG Business Model Is Broken (chiariglione.org)
theweatherelectric writes: Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder and chairman of MPEG, argues on his blog that the current MPEG business model is broken. He writes, "Thanks to [MPEG's] 'business model' that can be simply described as: produce standards having the best performance as a goal, irrespective of the IPR involved. Because MPEG standards are the best in the market and have an international standard status, manufacturers/service providers get a global market of digital media products, services and applications, and end users can seamless communicate with billions of people and access millions of services. Patent holders who allow use of their patents get hefty royalties with which they can develop new technologies for the next generation of MPEG standards. A virtuous cycle everybody benefits from." But, he argues, the MPEG model is now in crisis because the forthcoming AV1 video format from the Alliance for Open Media means that "everybody realizes that the old MPEG business model is broke, all the investments (collectively hundreds of millions USD) made by the industry for the new video codec [HEVC] will go up in smoke and AOM's royalty free model will spread to other business segments as well." Chiariglione goes on to explain what can be done: "The first action is to introduce what I call 'fractional options.' ISO envisages two forms of licensing: Option 1, i.e. royalty free and Option 2, i.e. FRAND, which is taken to mean 'with undetermined license.' We could introduce fractional options in the sense that a proposer could indicate that the technology be assigned to a specifically identified profile with an 'industry license' (defined outside MPEG) that does not contain monetary values. For instance, one such license could be 'no charge' (i.e. Option 1), another could be targeted to the OTT market etc."
"The second action, not meant to be alternative to the first, is to streamline the MPEG standard development process. Within this a first goal is to develop coding tools with 'clear ownership,' unlike today's tools which are often the result of contributions with possibly very different weights. A second goal is not to define profiles in MPEG. A third goal could be to embed in the standard the capability to switch coding tools on and off."
"The second action, not meant to be alternative to the first, is to streamline the MPEG standard development process. Within this a first goal is to develop coding tools with 'clear ownership,' unlike today's tools which are often the result of contributions with possibly very different weights. A second goal is not to define profiles in MPEG. A third goal could be to embed in the standard the capability to switch coding tools on and off."
The current MPEG "business model" has a name: rent-seeking.
Anyone trying to profit from the MPEG standard can go DIAF.
iOS 11 assistive typing, I think. In some other threads people have been spamming the instructions to turn it off.
.:Semper Absurda:.
VP9 hasn't become dominant but it has been beating HEVC in many markets. http://1yy04i3k9fyt3vqjsf2mv61...
It was Microsoft who drove the purchase price of browsers to zero, when they gave away IE to try to "cut off Netscape's air supply" in the famous phrase.
Google has never really "funded" Mozilla; they have always paid for search traffic, just like they pay Apple for iOS search traffic.
The MPEG model until now :
- create a standard (e.g.: MPEG 1 Video, MPEG Audio Layer I).
- concentrate on making the best compression, irrespective of patent situation
- because good compression and official standard, MPEG gets extremely popular and implemented everywhere.
- all the MPEG creators who hold patents band together, form a patent pool.
- the use the popularity of the standard and their patent pool to extract as much money as possible from as many people as possible.
- re-invest the money left over after the CEO's pay into producing the next standard. (e.g.: MPEG 2 Video, MPEG Audio Layer II, etc.)
- rinse and repeat
The problem (not directly clearly stated in the summary) :
- companies realize that they can make even more money
- patent holder stay hidden for a while, they push a new standard knowing that it's patent covered
- once the standard becomes pervasive to the point it's not possible to function without it (e.g.: MPEG Audio Layer III, a.k.a MP3), suddenly the patent holder wakes up (in this case: Frauenhoffer Institute).
- the holder tries to sue the shit out of everyone to make even more money.
- rent seeking and giant money grab rots the industry.
(Historically, it's not the first time this has happened. See the holders of the LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welsh) patent and the Graphics Interchage Format - GIF)
The current situations with MPEG HEVC / H.265 is a giant patent minefield, with several patent pools and/or patent holder each going for their maximal money grab.
To the point that HEVC/H265 isn't getting as widespread support in hardware as one would have expected when looking at its predecessors.
Meanwhile, the industry is fed up with this shit :
They've decided to do their own video standard with blackjack and hookers.
Actually forget about... blackjack.
They've decided to create a video standard with the explicit target for making it patent-free so it can be implemented for free by anyone who wants to use it online.
It's not the first time such a switch of standards on the grounds of being fed up has happened.
(The older being the switch from GIF to PNG by replacing the patented LZW compression with the free deflate).
And that is what frightens the MPEG guys.
----
As a note, a new standard won't necessarily devolve into the xkcd joke.
Each time, such switch have managed to actually succeed if :
- there is an actual push for the standard by the industry (e.g.: browser have started supporting PNG)
- the new standard is at least as good or even better that the old one (e.g.: PNG supports much more color schemes than the up to 256-palette of GIF. It also supports alpha channels, and the deflate compression is better).
The AV-1 is frightening the MPEG guys even more on these grounds.
- it's a coordinated effort by most of the industry big players including browser vendor, hardware vendor, server solution makers, etc. (i.e.: most of the company who make money by *using* video, as opposed to *selling the patents on the video* are in and pouring resources into it)
- it's a new gen codec, so of course it compresses somewhat better than the older standards.
And among the names of the companies involved, you see names who have been successful in deploying standards in the past :
- Google who have pushed their VPx series of codec.
- Xiph who have had relative success in the past:
- already with Vorbis against MP3 and WMA. It didn't get widely known by the general users, but it got a niche success : nearly all no-name asian media players supports it, it's used by several older audio streaming web companies - like Spotify and the completely free implementation have seen success in being used in various applications and engines - like game music)
- they did it again being among the company that contributed to OPUS, the free codec that currently beat everything else (including AAC) and is currently used by nearly any app/software on the
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well... there's been many failed attempts at trying to replace closed source codecs with open source ones
And the big web switch from GIF to PNG is a good exemple of a successful one. :
Usually it requires 2 things
- a big industry push
- as good or better as the replacement
like Theora, the VPx codecs, Direc,
Dirac is a very small scale stuff. Mainly pushed by the BBC and hence only used in their echo-system.
Regarding the VPx family :
- VP6 / Theora : happened late at a point when it wasn't that competitive against MPEG standard of the day and was only pushed by a handful of companies (mainly Xiph Mozilla, and considered by Google for Youtube) while the rest of the industry pushed for MPEG which *did* had patent costs, but not crazy ones yet.
- VP9 : pushed by Google, a company a tiny bit more relevant, but still not industry-wide, because people were betting on the upcoming MPEG-HEVC/H265 because nobody knew yet the massive patent minefield it was going to be.
- VP10 : see below.
Daala and so on.
Daala *is* AV-1.
AV-1 is done by combining the efforts of Xiph's Daala, Cisco's Thor, and Google's VP10.
Some parts didn't make it (Daala's Perceptual Vector Quantization - PVQ - currently isn't enabled by default in AV-1 and is considered too different/weird), other parts of Daala are actually in AV-1 (the entropy coders experiments of Daala are now part of the AV-1 standard).
Now: AV-1 is showing interesting results.
And nearly anyone who is relevant in the internet-video business is on it. (you find content streamer like Netflix and Google (Youtube), browser makers like Google (Chrome) and Mozilla (Firefox), etc. - the whole ecosystem is in there).
By the GIF/PNG exemple and unlike the less popular video formats mentioned above, all the chance are on AV-1's side.
Vorbis never caught on to replace MP3
It still had some limited success :
- nearly any no-name asian media-player supports it. (Despite a campaign by Microsoft's WMA certification to explicitly ban it)
- accepted as part of the IETF standards
- supported by all major browsers
- thus a few on-line web service have built around it (Spotify is one notorious example, and it's far from a tiny player).
- Youtube can optionally use it.
- Thanks to widely available free code, it has also found it's way in numerous software applications (lots of game engines used it)
So it's not as widely known by the public as MP3 or AAC, but it still beat WMA, and it still managed to get used quite a bit.
or AAC either.
Vorbis/MP3/WMA all predate AAC.
AAC appeared much later.
It also ended up feature many of the same problem as the MPEG Video codecs mentioned in the article : mainly heavy patenting.
So although it managed to gain a foothold in the TV/Radio (DAB+ and HD DVB-x) and Music selling (iTunes) business, it got completely blown out on internet.
OPUS has basically come and destroyed it. It has much better audio quality, and is completely free of patent licensing.
As such OPUS is what is used by nearly any modern app : Skype, WhatsApp, FB Messenger,... chances are if it's on your smartphone and allows you to talk with audio, it probably runs on OPUS.
There are even experiments in using it on radio (OPUS is an unofficial codec used in the "DRM" long range AM-like radio).
It's one straw in particular that broke the camel's back and it's that those licensing HEVC saw the rise of video streaming services and got a bit too greedy.
Yup, totally agree, it's the patent-trolling that killed HEVC (and AAC for that matters).
Basically, if you have Android and iPhone (= Google and Apple) recording AV1 video, YouTube and iTunes (= Google and Apple) delivering AV1 video to hardware decoding in smartphones (= Google and Apple) you hav
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
All the standard definition TV is MPEG2 based here in Europe or anyone on DVB-T and most of ATCS is MPEG2 based as well. Consequently broadcast TV will in part use MPEG2 for some considerable period of time.
But here is the rub the MPEG2 patents run out in just 15 days time on the 14th of February when 7334248 expires, which managed to sneak a whopping 1394 days extension from first filing. This is the only remaining patent from the MPEG-LA on MPEG2, as 6181712 expires *today*.