[M4IF Discuss] hourly usage fee for MPEG4

[Ben Waggoner]

Ken,
    Again, the real issue is the cost of the technology over its life -
except for the (substantial) administrative costs, it doesn't matter whether
the costs are up front in more expensive chips, or through license fees
later.  I'd bet that content providers were to pay $100 per customer over 5
years, they'd rather pay $0 up front and $20 a year instead of having to pay
$100 extra for a box and then nothing after that.
    Of course, if another technology can offer a lower net cost with
MPEG-4's advantages, than MPEG-4 is going to be in serious trouble.  At
$0.02/hour, I'm confident it'll beat MPEG-2 for virtually all uses.  Windows
Media is likely to be the most viable competitor there as a technology.  I'm
not sure what the different costs are there - Windows Media servers are
certainly quite a lot more expensive.
    On the whole, I'd prefer to eliminate the usage free in exchange for a
higher encoder fee.  This would be much easier to administer, and would put
the costs where customers are used to paying them.  $1 or even $5 per
encoder would work fine with the majority of the current encoder tool
market.
    I'm just trying to get people to discriminate between "MPEG-4 is too
expensive to license" versus "MPEG-4 licenses will be too difficult to
administer."  In many cases, I think the MPEG-4 total costs aren't bad, it's
just they're distributed in a painful way for many audiences.
Ben Waggoner
Interframe Media <http://www.interframemedia.com>
Digital Video Compression Consulting, Training, and Encoding
on 2/21/02 3:45 PM, Ken Goldsholl at kgoldsholl   oxygnet.com wrote:
> The $30/yr over 3 years is $90, which would be more than half the cost of IP
> STBs in a year or two.  I expect them to be under $200 sometime this year,
> and you know how the prices of electronics products keeps going down.
> 
> MPEG4 can increase the capacity of cable and other broadband networks, but
> so do other technologies that are paid for when the equipment is purchased.
> I still haven't heard the rationale for just one particular technology
> deserving a recurring revenue stream for its use.  The microprocessor in my
> computer probably consumed billions of dollars in development costs, as did
> alot of the software I use, but I still only pay once for the continued use
> of all these products.