> If you post such video on your website, you're violating mpeg4 patents and have to pay mpeg4 licensing fee (up to $5 million/year).
No. There is a (in my opinion) fairly permissive "free" tier[1]. Posting a h264 encoded video on your website does not immediately mean you need to pay royalties.
> That basically puts mpeg4 out of reach for 99.9% content creators that cannot afford even talking to mpeg4 consortium about the license.
I think that's a bit of hyperbole.
It's not cheap, but the MPEG-LA don't charge you for talking to them. If you submit a valid request for a license based on your units[2], then they will provide you with one. In fact, you don't need to pay fees if your paid-for content is less than 12 minutes long[2], and you're looking at $5000/year + $2500 per encoder for a 500k - 999k audience.
As always comes up in the discussions of AVC/h264 vs WebM/Theora/VP8-9: there's no guarantee that use of the latter solutions provides protection from patent litigation. AVC/h264 isn't immune either, but at least you have an idea and (so far) there doesn't appear to have been any major trolls chasing h264 content distributors. WebM/VP8/etc are untested here; not just because of their youth but also because there are few (if any?) big deployments outside of YouTube (and even then).
Saying the free tier means you don't need to pay royalties is a bit of a stretch. Are you suggesting everyone who wants to post videos should somehow configure their web server to power itself off after serving up exactly N copies of the mpeg-4 video stream? That's ridiculous.
If you put mpeg-4 video up on the internet, eventually the MPEG-LA will come calling for royalties; the question is just how long you can stay under the radar. Maybe you can forever, but counting on it is bad business. Making choices for how to build internet technologies (and businesses) based on the MPEG-LA's current licensing terms is not great thinking either. What do you suggest people do if the terms change in 2016 to be more aggressive, once the MPEG-LA no longer feels the need to offer free tiers to improve adoption?
I also don't know how you can say there are no big trolls chasing h264 content distributors. Motorola rolled up with submarine h264 patents and asserted them against one of the biggest players in the business - the only thing stopping them from going after companies that do pure content distribution is whether it would be profitable.
Comments
> If you post such video on your website, you're violating mpeg4 patents and have to pay mpeg4 licensing fee (up to $5 million/year).
No. There is a (in my opinion) fairly permissive "free" tier[1]. Posting a h264 encoded video on your website does not immediately mean you need to pay royalties.
> That basically puts mpeg4 out of reach for 99.9% content creators that cannot afford even talking to mpeg4 consortium about the license.
I think that's a bit of hyperbole.
It's not cheap, but the MPEG-LA don't charge you for talking to them. If you submit a valid request for a license based on your units[2], then they will provide you with one. In fact, you don't need to pay fees if your paid-for content is less than 12 minutes long[2], and you're looking at $5000/year + $2500 per encoder for a 500k - 999k audience.
As always comes up in the discussions of AVC/h264 vs WebM/Theora/VP8-9: there's no guarantee that use of the latter solutions provides protection from patent litigation. AVC/h264 isn't immune either, but at least you have an idea and (so far) there doesn't appear to have been any major trolls chasing h264 content distributors. WebM/VP8/etc are untested here; not just because of their youth but also because there are few (if any?) big deployments outside of YouTube (and even then).
[1]: http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/mpeg-la-h264... [2]: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsS...
Saying the free tier means you don't need to pay royalties is a bit of a stretch. Are you suggesting everyone who wants to post videos should somehow configure their web server to power itself off after serving up exactly N copies of the mpeg-4 video stream? That's ridiculous.
If you put mpeg-4 video up on the internet, eventually the MPEG-LA will come calling for royalties; the question is just how long you can stay under the radar. Maybe you can forever, but counting on it is bad business. Making choices for how to build internet technologies (and businesses) based on the MPEG-LA's current licensing terms is not great thinking either. What do you suggest people do if the terms change in 2016 to be more aggressive, once the MPEG-LA no longer feels the need to offer free tiers to improve adoption?
I also don't know how you can say there are no big trolls chasing h264 content distributors. Motorola rolled up with submarine h264 patents and asserted them against one of the biggest players in the business - the only thing stopping them from going after companies that do pure content distribution is whether it would be profitable.
$5000 for 1 million users is a CPM of $5. That seems pretty expensive for advertising funded content.