[M4IF Discuss] What is the REAL advantage?

[Rob Koenen]

It is an open standard, anyone can create technology supporting
it, and many are in fact doing that. The competition among the
various providers will ensure quality products, be they encoders,
decoders, authoring tools, etc.
Using such an open format, the need for supporting multiple 
proprietary formats, in many cases a burden, will disappear.
Licensing -- the absence thereof -- has so far been the blocking
factor for MPEG-4's adoption. Now that it will become available,
It will determine the viability of the standard in the various 
application spaces.
How this plays out will be greatly dependent on the application and
its underlying business model. In the case of, e.g., a DVD, I see 
it working like this (BUT THIS IS ONLY MY INTERPRETATION OF MPEGLA'S 
PRESS RELEASE!)
* encoders and decoders are free, because there is a renumeration 
  for the content, and hence a use fee;
* use fee is based on the playtime of the DVD. If there is 90 minutes
  of MPEG-4 programming, then the use fee would be 3 cents.
Best,
Rob
ps: interestingly, MPEG-4 is great for authoring non-linear content,
and for such content the concept "play time" may be very hard to 
establish for such material. What would you do, e.g., with a game in
which you can spend hours and hours or get "killed" in 5 minutes?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sanjay Kulkarni [mailto:kulkarniS   dvd.panasonic.com]
> Sent: Monday, February 04, 2024 10:28
> Cc: discuss   lists.m4if.org
> Subject: [M4IF Discuss] What is the REAL advantage?
> 
> 
> 
> Deal All:
> 
> I would like to use this board to clarify my basic doubt 
> about using the
> MPEG-4 format for streaming media.
> 
> I am doing a study to provide streaming media solutions for 
> consumers and am
> considering formats like Windows Media, QuickTime, Real and 
> MPEG4. What is
> the real advantage of providing an MPEG-4 based streaming 
> media solution?
> Quality/bandwidth issues apart, I am of the opinion that 
> licensing would be
> the killer to launching this format in the market (again, this is a
> comparative statement to the rest of the streaming media 
> formats). Not to
> mention that the rest of the players are already popular in 
> the market and
> their codecs are cheaply (if not freely) available.
> 
> Any comments would be appreciated. Thanks!
> 
> Regards,
> Sanjay Kulkarni
> Senior Software Engineer
> Panasonic Disc Services Corp.
> 
> 
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