Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M

NooneAtAll3

what are the open source alternatives?

hollow-moe

Aren't VP9 and AV1 supposed to be "royalty free formats" ?

mrweasel

That's just trying to promote a competitor. This is more or less what Fraunhofer did with the mp3 license, which resulted in bunch of new, and better formats.

kmeisthax

This seems particularly desperate, but I'm not surprised this is happening, given that patent owners in general have been very angry that H.264 didn't wind up being nearly as lucrative as MPEG-2 was. Hell, I remember the days when they couldn't even agree if H.264 should have a free streaming tier at all or not - and it seems like that went away. Maybe Google should finally make good on their threat to only stream YouTube in royalty-free standards.

falkensmaize

I guess to me this doesn't seem like that big of a deal? I mean if you have a 100 million subscribers, do you really care much about a few $million increase? I thought the big players like Youtube had already moved to open source codecs already anyway.

VladVladikoff

I’m confused about this. If I have video on my website that is encoded in x264 am I obligated to pay fees?

jauntywundrkind

They should be sued. It's incredible discriminatory to make it so ridiculously hard for new players to complete. Hopefully the Licensing Alliance never ever ever gets another customer ever again. Hopefully no one uses any of their new encodings. This is an untrustworthy company, that always have been out to fleece the industry and hold back humanity. Licensing Alliance embodies Lawful Evil, is a stain on the patent system as a whole. It's hard to find the words for how awful, how enraging this cabal is. Ugh. What an evil drain. We should be able to use computers for audio and video, and it shouldnt involve kings ransoms to some jerks who are better at paperwork & lawyering. All that work on av1 and av2 looking more and more civilization ally essential as times goes on.

ronsor

My advice (not a lawyer) is to ignore the licensing fees; the patents will all be dead by 2027 anyway. Also I'm not responsible for whatever happens if you do this.

Noaidi

So should I re-encode all my videos to OGG? I’m really confused what this means for the average person who has home videos encoded in these formats.

KronisLV

That's an insane amount. That makes me feel even more strongly about throwing proprietary and predatory codecs in the trash and opting to use AV1 et al wherever possible, it's better anyways and surely close to a decade after coming out, we'd expect devices to support it well enough.

cs702

Profit-seeking at society's expense. Also known as rent-seeking: "The act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, heightened debt levels, risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions, and potential national decline."[a] Sigh. --- [a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

userbinator

Trying to milk the last drop before the patents expire? H.264 patents have already expired in most of the world and the remaining ones, which might not even be necessary for the vast majority of H.264 use, are also approaching expiry very soon: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

amelius

Communication formats should not be patentable. The potential for lock in abuse is too high.