[M4IF Discuss] RE: [M4IF News] MPEG-4 Visual and Systems Licensing Announced!!

[William J. Fulco]

This license's terms are much better...
Clearly people like Apple and Real and such can just drop the $1M (well,
maybe "drop" is too flip a word - sorry Dave :-) and pay-off the license for
the year and then give away millions and millions of encoders/decoders...
for the little garage-shop codec-implementation house, well - this term
could be problematic... you're right about the "use for 3 days and then
discard", I've got a dozen codecs like that on my system easily.... This is
going to be a tough one. I guess you could make your MPEG-4 codec expire - I
wonder how that is going to play to the licensing guys? Is it "downloads" of
MPEG-4 codecs or is it "being used" codecs - I suspect it is the former...
Here's a question I had...
A line in the press release:
"Current cable television, direct satellite television and over-the-air
broadcast that one day may allow a broadcaster to address its broadcast to a
specific viewer or subscriber will pay a royalty of $0.25 for the right to
manufacture and sell each decoder and encoder and the party providing
content service to the subscriber will pay a royalty of $1.25 for the
paid-up right to use a decoder to decode and use encoded MPEG-4 Visual
information."
OK - so let me get this straight...
If say, SA, Mot or TiVo build an MPEG-4 set-top box they pay $0.25 - OK,
fine. However if the user subscribes to a 200-channel package on DirecTV or
Digital cable does this mean that every one of those channel
content-providers must pay $1.25 for a paid-up license to distribute to that
box? So on a "basic package" - someone (who is likely?) must pay $250 to
MPEG-LA per sub - if DirecTV has 20M subs by that time (and they'vet gone
MPEG-4), does that mean they (or somebody) owes MPEG-LA $2.5Billion?
There is that implication about "addressable decoder" - so does that mean
that only the premium-channels like HBO will have to pay for each sub in a
system? If I have a premium-super-pack with dozens and dozens of
movie-channels do I/we/they have to pay (1.25 x (dozens and dozens)) dollars
for this package?
Maybe this better than $0.02/hour content fee - but I'm not so sure it will
make CE MPEG-4 work for sat and cable systems. These particular economics
would seem to favor delivery of TV programming to such set-top devices via
broadband/web-site (Jordan will be happy) and not previous
delivery-infrastructure.
But I digress...
++Bill
wjf   NetworkXXIII.com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: discuss-admin   lists.m4if.org
> [mailto:discuss-admin   lists.m4if.org]On Behalf Of Mikael
> Bourges-Sevenier
> Sent: Monday, July 15, 2023 4:43 PM
> To: 'Rob Koenen'; 'M4IF news (E-mail)'; 'M4IF Discussion List (E-mail)'
> Subject: [M4IF Discuss] RE: [M4IF News] MPEG-4 Visual and Systems
> Licensing Announced!!
>
>
> > > However, what happens to companies that provide a freely
> > downloadable
> > > player? If I read correctly, they are subject to the $1M/y cap for
> > > video and $100k/y for Systems, am I correct?
> >
> > Sounds like it. If you are not in the video surveillance
> > business, you
> > may want to add Audio to your system (and you may even like audio
> > if you *are* in the surveillance business).
> >
> > These companies also seem entitled to distribute the first
> > 50,000 systems for free. But given the fact that you only
> > mention the caps and not the per en/de-coder royalties, you
> > must be thinking Big.
>
> These days, an internet player with 'cool' contents can easily reach
> 50000 installs/year even though many of them are often installed for few
> days and removed. Then the million dollar question: is there a 30-day
> money back guarantee? Just kidding ;-)
>
> Mike
>
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