Unauthoritative Pronouncements

Gather round boys and girls and listen to Ars tell the tale about how the companies fought each other over patents and licensing!

A new industry group called HEVC Advance is threatening to demand royalties for the new HEVC video codec that could halve the bandwidth required for streaming online video, or offer higher resolutions with the same bandwidth usage. The organization is promising to demand a royalty of 0.5 percent of revenue from any broadcaster that uses the codec. This move could re-ignite the arguments surrounding video codecs on the Web, and may well jeopardize services such as Netflix’s year old 4K streaming service.

Maybe if we all get really lucky they’ll just keep this Sword of Damocles hanging over UHD streaming, and whatever the next format happens to be?

This fragile situation is now jeopardized by HEVC Advance. MPEG LA has no authority over the patents—it doesn’t own them, it simply has a non-exclusive right to sell licenses to them—and companies with HEVC-relevant patents are under no obligation to join MPEG LA. If those companies are unhappy with MPEG LA’s terms, they don’t have to participate

They should have gone with Pied Piper. It has a higher Weissman Score than HVEC.