It seems to me that the excellent work done by Xiph.org and Google to create open and free encoders have the H.264 patent holders scrambling to get H.264 entrenched as the de-facto video standard. Cisco's plan to distribute the encoder freely is a brilliant way to do that.
Everyone seems to think that Cisco is the good guy, doing the open source community a great favour. However Cisco is a H.264 patent holder and receives royalties. With H.264 as THE standard, the yearly cap Cisco would pay is nothing compared to the total royalties received from all H.264 embedded devices such as smart phones, tablets, DVD players, cameras, etc. You just have to look at the profit Microsoft makes from the FAT patent to see how lucrative this is (even if split over many companies).
Indirectly consumers will have to continue paying royalties for every H.264 embedded device they purchase (and video content too), probably until 2027. Competition from Xiph.org and Google may have kept those fees much smaller than they could have been (unlike MP3 licensing terms, for example). With H.264 entrenched, competition is irrelevant and the fees and terms can change with impunity.
I sincerely hope Daala and Opus are successful in the next round so I can spend more time developing software without having to walk through the increasingly dense patent minefield.
Freedom from patents delayed until 2027
Date: 2013-11-14 01:25 am (UTC)Everyone seems to think that Cisco is the good guy, doing the open source community a great favour. However Cisco is a H.264 patent holder and receives royalties. With H.264 as THE standard, the yearly cap Cisco would pay is nothing compared to the total royalties received from all H.264 embedded devices such as smart phones, tablets, DVD players, cameras, etc. You just have to look at the profit Microsoft makes from the FAT patent to see how lucrative this is (even if split over many companies).
Indirectly consumers will have to continue paying royalties for every H.264 embedded device they purchase (and video content too), probably until 2027. Competition from Xiph.org and Google may have kept those fees much smaller than they could have been (unlike MP3 licensing terms, for example). With H.264 entrenched, competition is irrelevant and the fees and terms can change with impunity.
I sincerely hope Daala and Opus are successful in the next round so I can spend more time developing software without having to walk through the increasingly dense patent minefield.