[M4IF Discuss] To those concerned about MPEG- 4 Licensing ...

[richard mizer]

To add to this discussion point....MPEG-4 offers a greater scope of multimedia
options than Real Video, or Media Player (perhaps not Quicktime, but...)....on
the other hand, both Corona and Real 9 probably provide better video quality
than MPEG-4 in the currently licensed profiles...this is a no win situation
for two reasons...first, while Real has fees and Media Player has its own
problems, neither expects per use fees (with the possible exception of Real
Server) so their administrative costs are much less to the  users.  Second,
and more important, they have a significant head start and gigantic market
share...MPEG-4 is building tools that may be available soon, and while the
video licensing arrangements and audio licensing arrangements have been
posted, without much acceptance...there are other patents that truly
differentiate MPEG-4 from the proprietary solutions that have yet to
surface....they are losing ground to the encumbants.
The bottom line is,   unless MPEG-4 becomes easier, and cheaper, to use than
Media Player or Real it is dead.  Cheaper can come with hardware decoders
based on a standard so chips that support MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 can be installed
in settops...easier to use requires user friendly tools of which there are
only a few so far.
An analogy is appopriate...
in 1996 DVD authoring was in its infancy...players didn't exist...authoring
software was very buggy, and expensive...but their only competition was VHS
(and Laserdisc) which didn't even compete with the functionality that DVD
offered.
In 2002...while MPEG-4 offers functionality that Media Player and Real cannot
really provide...authoring software is very buggy and not really even
available...and so the competition is currently superior.
Within the next 6 months MPEG-4 will either live or die in the
market...partlly because of competition from Real and Microsoft, which is
enough to worry about...but even more so because the start-up companies
building MPEG-4 tools are faced with an uncertainty of survival that limits
their ability to make the tools user friendly and successful because of this
licensing dilemna....even established companies line the roadway as VC has
dried up.
To complete the analogy...the two companies that made DVD happen are Daikin
and Toshiba....fortunately Daikin's DVD authoring software team was
camoflagued inside a mulitbillion dollar airconditioner company...and Toshiba
was under extreme pressure from Warner Bros to make it happen at any
cost...eventually they enforced license fees but not until after DVD players
and discs and authoring systems were being sold in the millions....as
far as I
know the first public presentation by MPEG-LA was at the DVD Pro
conference in
Santa Barbara on August 31, 2023 , after DVD was well on its way to commercial
success, and then they were given a years grace period (I have the
presentation notes since I was also a speaker at the conference).
Do Envivio, IVast, even Philips...have that luxury....MPEG-4 is in
jeapordy of
being still-born...MPEG LA is counting the money before any has been made.
If I have any message to the license holders it is this:
give it away for now...get everyone hooked...and then renegotiate licensing
fees down the road when there is something out there to collect....otherwise
all of us have wasted all our time, and you won't make a penny.
Rob Koenen wrote:
> Dan Miller wrote:
>
> > If MPEG-4 really does become a standard (in the defacto,
> > near-universal-adoption sense as opposed to something agreed upon by a
> > standards body), it will be because it works in the marketplace, both
> > technically and businesswise.
>
> Fully agreed.
>
> As has been noted before, and as was repeated a number of times in the
> special M4IF meeting on licensing yesterday: MPEG-4 has competition, and
> needs to earn its place as a viable solution. The issue that remains is
> mostly the license. 'Reasonable' in licensing terms is always a vague term,
> but it can be directly translated to 'Allowing competitive solutions to
> be built", which makes it much more concrete and tangible.
>
> Best,
> Rob
>
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