H.264 Streaming Fees: What Changed, Who's Affected, and What It Means

breve

There's no point supporting these parasitic business models. Use royalty-free video and audio formats. AV1 for video: https://aomedia.org/specifications/av1/ And Opus for audio: https://opus-codec.org/

canpan

Patent free video is in a strange space. I recently looked into just using old formats. To be super safe. With audio we have mp3 which is good enough for a lot of cases and seems to be patent free. But for mpeg2 (used on DVD) even though it is really old (1995?) it is still patent encumbered in some places until 2035? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-2

ZeroGravitas

This author has worked on behalf of the patent parasite companies before so if you are left feeling "I need to pay these people" that may not be accurate.

uyzstvqs

Relevant: Have the patents for H.264 MPEG-4 AVC expired yet? https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

cowpig

A sure sign that this is completely, utterly, decoupled from market forces is the way that a 5M-person streaming platform (which likely has negative margins or is struggling to make profit) is expected to pay $0.45/user, while Netflix is expected to pay 1.5 cents per user. I would guess that this is because the larger the number for major players, the more incentive they would have to invest in supporting open standards (or try and get a standard of their own). This is evidence that the patent system is not doing what it's supposed to be doing imo.

Hizonner

Aw, man, not this shit again.