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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."
"it made sense" is not the term I'd use.
"paying rent to the MPEG patent trolls was unavoidable" is more accurate.
Nobody should shed a tear for these trolls. They don't deserve any sympathy. They benefited from being parasites for far too long as it is. Now, they can go die in a fucking fire. And piss on them after the fire has gone out, not before.
What MPEG is learning is that in reality the world does not need them because open standards are far more cost effective,
Well... there's been many failed attempts at trying to replace closed source codecs with open source ones like Theora, the VPx codecs, Direc, Daala and so on. The only one with a bit of traction was VP9 but not more than that I'd call it a trial balloon. Vorbis never caught on to replace MP3 or AAC either. 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. The MPEG standards have mostly been driven by dedicated AV companies that make like camcorders and set top boxes and they've sorta refused to see the massive power shift caused by the trend towards streaming/smartphones.
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 have a working ecosystem entirely without Canon/Nikon/Panasonic/Samsung/NEC/Fujitsu/JVC and so on. Companies like Intel, AMD and nVidia don't really care that much because practically they need to support HEVC in hardware anyway, they just need to be on board. That's a one time expense, AV1 is free but the HEVC patents will probably expire before they can remove support. It's the possibility of running royalties that caused uproar.
To me this is more like why Google funded Mozilla rather than start Chrome much earlier, they wanted an open web to deliver web apps and through an open source browser they got all forces allied against IE. They didn't care about giving away the browser because it wasn't their money maker. Same with AV1, they're making and giving away the codec because they'll make plenty money on services that use AV1. It's a bad time to be MPEG, they're like Opera that was trying to sell a browser in a market where everyone else is giving it away. It should be expected, you don't really make any money selling JPG or PNG or MP3 codecs... eventually the market for paying for a video codec would dry up. But they probably hoped it would be a while longer...
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Wow. That's basically a declaration of surrender by the chairman of MPEG. This is a great day for free software. It's been a long time coming.
MPEG will live on in broadcast TV. With 8k coming in a couple of years that will almost certainly be broadcast as some kind of MPEG stream. Of course current 4k broadcasting is all MPEG 4. But for the internet, it's days do seem to be numbered.
Side note, I had a look at some 8k TVs recently. They were inferior to the earlier demos because the compression artefacts were very noticeable. Current BluRay 8k streams are woefully inadequate. It will be interesting to see what they use for broadcast.
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I think it's more an artefact of centralisation. The MPEG model kind-of makes sense in a world where there are lots of smallish companies that want to use a video CODEC (ideally an interoperable one). MPEG provided a model where they could all pay a small amount and share the R&D costs (not a great model, because only stuff that was both patented and pushed in made it, so Apple stayed there with a patent covering part of the QuickTime .mov file format and nothing else, academics who developed a bunch of the ideas but didn't patent them got nothing, smaller players with better patented ideas were worked around and ignored). The difference now is that there are a number of companies making so much from having a decent video CODEC that they can afford to cover the entire R&D costs themselves (e.g. Google with YouTube, Netflix, Apple with the iTunes store). Any of them working in isolation could produce a decent CODEC and save more in royalties than they'd spend on R&D. A group of them together will pay far less in total R&D and then end up with something that doesn't require any license accounting (saving them more).
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To me, the critical thing to grok here is that there were sufficient powerful interests that wanted MPEG dead and were willing to coordinate and to spend freely to make it happen. The fact that we are going to get native hardware support in the next generation of everything for AOM formats seals the deal and makes my point: you have to spend millions over long lead times to bake things into silicon.
This is all a Good Thing(TM) because in this case the AOM solution is preferable to the MPEG solution, but it's definitely not some David-beats-Goliath scenario where some kid in a garage takes down the big-bad using the magic of open standards. In fact, if anything, the forces behind AOM are (and proved to be) even more Goliath-y than MPEG and it shows that industry power has shifted in their direction.
So less David-beats-Goliath and more like a bigger Goliath decided not to put up with a mini-Goliath anymore. Or, if you prefer, the king is dead, long live the king.
MPEG standards are open. That's the point of a standard. You can download the final drafts for free.
You can download the drafts for free (the technical documentation that explains the standard).
You cannot write a software freely - in jurisdiction that do recognize software patent (e.g.: the USA) the technology inside several codecs from MPEG (Mostly AVC / H264, HEVC / H265 , and AAC) are covered by patent.
If you attempt anything beyond simply reading the drafts, like actually writing code, you'd be violating IP rights in countries with software patent (in USA).
If you attempt to build a physical device around the standard (e.g.: hardware accelerating codec chip), you'd be again going against patent, in nearly all jurisdiction (in EU too).
MPEG doesn't sue. That is MPEG-LA, a completely separate organization.
To be correct:
The patent holder sue.
And the problems starting from H265 / MPEG-HEVC upward is that MPEG-LA isn't any more the only single organisation holding patents.
The world is not a simple place and the devil is in the details.
Yeah, I agree that the devil is in the details. That's why I called my over-simplification the "Easy Reader" version.
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Research into codecs will not stop because nobody is paying for codecs. For example, our research into the digital voice codec "Codec2" has progressed to the point that our fully Open Source codec can encode clear voice into a 700 bit per second bitstream. It is an improvement over previously available commercial codecs, and our software modems, when used with SDR radios, yield about a 10 dB improvement over the modulation all vendors were previously using for digital voice two-way radios.
The problem with MPEG is that many entities, from individual researchers to large, deep-pockets companies, were willing to put in effort to make software just as good or better, but under Open Source terms. MPEG made itself the poster boy for its own elimination, as has every other entity that has attempted to push a royalty-based technology as a web standard. Many people want an open web, and are willing to pay for the research without then monetizing it.
Bruce Perens.
There is really a relatively small group of researchers working on all of these codecs. For example, Jean-Marc Valin is a big contributor to Opus, also contributed to Codec2. A lot of them are radio hams too, and I run into them at conferences devoted to SDR.
Bruce Perens.