[M4IF Discuss] (no subject)

[Daniel B. Miller]

however, caps are inherently discriminatory to small companies.  A sliding
scale is more fair.
FWIW I think any kind of usage fee is bound to fail.  We and other smaller
codec co's have flirted with this kind of pricing over the years, and it
has almost always been a disaster.
Customers tend to find any pricing scheme where they pay more for their
use of a product inherently unfair.  They want to pay for what they buy,
not what they do with it after they buy it.  Among other issues, in many
cases there is little interest in having _any_ party know how much of your
product you are selling.  If it's too little, you look like a failure.  If
it's too much, everybody invoved in the project wants a raise.  It's a
lose/lose.
 ___  Dan Miller
(++,) CTO and founder, On2 Technologies
On Wed, 8 May 2002, William J. Fulco wrote:
> Rob,
>
> > > I'm just offering other possibilities.
> >
> > Thanks for the contributions Bill, It is good to be able to flesh out all
> > the licensing issues in public. These discussions help.
>
> I hope so... just trying to clarify the issues - I often see buyers that
> think they've got some right to what's being sold at a price that they're
> happy with - and sellers that think buyers have no choice. It's all just a
> negotiation....
>
> Some thoughts from earlier...
>
> Basically what we (the buyers) are saying is we want a low-cost to build the
> market and the sellers are saying they're afraid of missing-out on a
> potential "boom" so they want a high-price - usually this kind of thing is
> handled with a "percentage of the take" kind of deal (they don't make money
> until we make money) - but the accounting and privacy issues in that kind of
> deal are always problematic (as we've seen here). One way to handle the
> account issues is not to try to take a percentage of the user's income - but
> to charge a unit-cost for the producer's goods - this is where the 2cents/hr
> comes in. This is better than auditing the user's books to see how much
> money they made - but it's still an accounting/privacy problem and at 2c the
> price is still potentially a killer.
>
> They could do it as a sliding scale - 0.1 cents for the first x hours, up to
> 2cents for whatever... (this could handle the price issue for small users -
> but potentially not the accounting) Another possible way to handle the
> baggage-free issue - especially the accounting-problems - would be to not do
> it as pure 2cents/hr - but perhaps as tiers - $150/year for up to 10,000
> hours (1 stream * 2 cents/hr * 365 * 24) or maybe 50,000 - small-fry get it
> cheap - of content streamed and maybe $500/year for up to 100,000 hours and
> such... based on "last years' numbers" - that way no penalty for "guessing
> wrong" and very little accounting (again, I'm taking out the
> easy-to-account-for potential MPEG-4 DVD market)... with a grace-period.
> Maybe there is a cap at 100,000 hours/content year? or 1,000,000 hours or
> 5,000,000 or some such
>
> Again it's the uncertainty that causes the problem - the small producers -
> internet radio-stations etc are afraid that they're business model can't
> support a "success problem" and/or that the accounting is too intrusive -
> fine - they buy a bulk-license - pay your $150 or $500 and you're good to go
> for the year.  The big producers like cable-TV MSOs are afraid that if they
> convert over that 2c/hr * all their channels on all their systems * all the
> hours in the day mean HUGE expenses - then they need a cap - 5,000,000
> hours/year means that they pay $100,000 and they're good to go no matter how
> big their system - again - with little accounting nightmare...
>
> If the price is sufficiently low - like the $0.25/encoder and $0.25/decoder
> with a cap - then big consumers (like Apple) can just write the check for
> the max and call it a day. Same could be done with usage-fees - if there is
> very inexpensive entry number - then small users can write a (small) check
> and be done with it. If there is a cap on the total amount per "entity"
> perhaps - the big companies can write a (rather large) check and be done
> with it.
>
>
> ++Bill
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss   lists.m4if.org
> http://lists.m4if.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>