MPEG LA previously announced it would not charge royalties for such video through December 31, 2015, and today’s announcement makes clear that royalties will continue not to be charged for such video beyond that time. Products and services other than Internet Broadcast AVC Video continue to be royalty-bearing.
MPEG LA’s AVC Patent Portfolio License provides access to essential patent rights for the AVC/H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10) digital video coding standard. In addition to Internet Broadcast AVC Video, MPEG LA’s AVC Patent Portfolio License provides coverage for devices that decode and encode AVC video, AVC video sold to end users for a fee on a title or subscription basis and free television video services. AVC video is used in set-top boxes, media player and other personal computer software, mobile devices including telephones and mobile television receivers, Blu-ray Disc players and recorders, Blu-ray video optical discs, game machines, personal media player devices and still and video cameras.
For more information about MPEG LA’s AVC License or to request a copy of the License, please visit here.
Cade Metz reports for The Register, “This means that if you use H.264 solely for free web-video applications, you will never have to pay a fee to the MPEG-LA.”
“The move is an apparent response to Google’s WebM web-media format, which was open sourced in May under its own royalty-free license,” Metz reports. “At the heart of WebM is the VP8 video codec Google that acquired when it purchased video compression outfit On2 Technologies in a deal valued at $124.6 million. Google’s aim was to create a completely royalty-free alternative to H.264 for use with the fledgling HTML5 video tag, and the new WebM format was promptly embraced by Opera and Mozilla.”
Metz reports, “MPEG-LA… will continue to charge when H.264 is used with for-pay applications, [so] Odds are that Google, Mozilla, and Opera will push ahead with WebM… Whereas Opera and Mozilla have committed to WebM, Apple and Microsoft are sticking with H.264 — though Microsoft has said that Internet Explorer 9 users will be able to use WebM if they install it on their machines themselves. Apple’s Steve Jobs has made it clear he has no interest whatsoever in WebM, and we’re likely headed for a clash of the titans. After Google open sourced VP8, the MPEG-LA said it was “looking into” a patent-pool license for VP8, challenging Google’s effort to make it completely free, and Jobs has indicated that he won’t adopt open video codecs because they’re subject to patent attack. But Apple is part of the MPEG-LA’s H.264 patent pool — as is Microsoft. The chess game has only begun.”
Read more int he full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “iWill” for the heads up.]
And the big loser is…
^Consumers.
Buh bye Flash! Good riddance!
@leodavinci What?
“…during the entire life of this License.”
That is a very ambiguous statement.
What is the life of “this License”?
Sounds like a lawyer wrote it.
Sweet, we have an HTML5 codec… I think.
Well, all we need now is the Mozilla team do climb down from their high horse and implement this in Firefox. They are the biggest fly in the HTML5 ointment, since they don’t support H.264, on the account of it not being “open source”, i.e. being owned by the MPEG-LA, where a license must be paid for commercial use. The worst irony is that Mozilla team has no issue with Adobe (nor any other proprietary) plug-ins (such as Flash, Director, Reader, etc). Plug-in developers can develop for whatever, but no, Mozilla team is NOT going to pay for a license in order to implement any open-standard technology (such as any of the MPEG video flavours). This makes it really difficult to advertise HTML5 as more ubiquitous than Flash, when you can’t even see H.264 (or any other MPEG-encoded) video in Firefox if you embed it directly using HTML5; you have to use proprietary plug-ins (QuickTime, RealMedia, Flip4Mac, etc). So, content creators are now really forced to build two sets of pages: one in HTML5, for Flash-free devices (Apple), the other for Firefox (and Flash). This is really colossally annoying.
And I don’t think this new free license will change anything. Vast majority of web operators who provide H.264 content aren’t covered by this license and have to pay for it (commercial use). Consequently, Mozilla team would have to also seek (and pay for) the license to implement the codec in Firefox, as it would allow commercial (for profit) streaming.
Mozila folks are simply shooting themselves in the foot with their moral high stance. Just as they were grabbing that market share away from MS, they now are putting themselves in a position to give it right back, with MSIE supporting HTML5, AND H.264 (and any other MPEG standard) out of the box.
As I said, colossally annoying…
YESSSSS! WHOOOHOOOOOO!…………..what an MPEG LA: H.264 codec license”?
@Predrag, Mozilla doesn’t pay a thing for proprietary formats implemented by plugins by their respective vendors.
HTML5, however, requires support to be built-in to the browser itself, without plugins.
Annoying to end users and web developers? Yes. Understandable? Also yes.
@leodavinci
Please explain?!
Goodbye Flash. Those freak’n guy’s/gal’s from Macromedia….sitting on a beach somewhere drinking all that cash. Best sales job ever, perfectly brilliant!
Isn’t it now up to the WC3 to pick a CODEC for HTML5?
From what I’m reading it would be free for Mozilla to implement support for H.264 in Firefox since their product is free to the end user but maybe I’m mistaken. I believe Opera charges for their browser so they would not be able to freely implement support for H.264.
“…royalties will continue not to be charged…”
Must have been written by a lawyer.
@Mo
Yes, just like they picked the JPEG codec for the IMG tag
Yea, Opera’s 5 users and Mozilla’s 10.
Yea, Opera’s 5 users and Mozilla’s 10.
Yea, Opera’s 5 users and Mozilla’s 10.
Yea, Opera’s 5 users and Mozilla’s 10.
Yea, Opera’s 5 users and Mozilla’s 10.
Yea, Opera’s 5 users and Mozilla’s 10.
Yea, Opera’s 5 users and Mozilla’s 10.
@Mo,
Except the WC3 never did that with JPEG, which is why you can use .jpg, .gif, .png or any format with the img tag and then it’s up to the browser to interpret the MIME correctly.
Same thing here. The video tag won’t define the codec by default.
@Predrag, it really isn’t that much work to support the VIDEO tag and Flash at the same time on the same page. Take a look at http://connectedsocialmedia.com
I’d be happy to explain how this works or help advise on how to implement. It’s really quite easy to support both.
Also content providers are going to continue to support Flash because there’s a lot of features you can offer with it: sharing, playlists, copying of embed code, etc…
Plus it’s going to be many years before everyone upgrades their browsers. There are still a significant number of IE6 users.
sadly this doesn’t really change anything