Just as a counterpoint that illustrates the patent upgrade treadmill, you say that nothing has come close to displacing MP3 for distributing audio files, yet if you're distributing that audio as the soundtrack for a video then MP3 has been quite firmly displaced by AAC due to bundling by the MPEG group (even though pirates held out with MPEG-4/DivX & mp3 for years).
You could even argue that the fact that it always comes with such (relatively) large size video files makes the improvements of AAC over MP3 even less relevant, but still the "standard" has moved on and everyone needs to keep up. I also believe that 3G phones needed to support AAC but I could be just making that up.
I've seen one "mp3 player" that dropped AAC support, but I can't see that happening for any device that also wants video. The direct result will be paying separate royalties on two mostly overlapping audio formats.
Comments
Just as a counterpoint that illustrates the patent upgrade treadmill, you say that nothing has come close to displacing MP3 for distributing audio files, yet if you're distributing that audio as the soundtrack for a video then MP3 has been quite firmly displaced by AAC due to bundling by the MPEG group (even though pirates held out with MPEG-4/DivX & mp3 for years).
You could even argue that the fact that it always comes with such (relatively) large size video files makes the improvements of AAC over MP3 even less relevant, but still the "standard" has moved on and everyone needs to keep up. I also believe that 3G phones needed to support AAC but I could be just making that up.
I've seen one "mp3 player" that dropped AAC support, but I can't see that happening for any device that also wants video. The direct result will be paying separate royalties on two mostly overlapping audio formats.