Today's WTF Moment: A Competing HEVC Licensing Pool

[xiphmont]

Had this happened next week, I'd have thought it was an April Fools' joke.

Out of nowhere, a new patent licensing group just announced it has formed a second, competing patent pool for HEVC that is independent of MPEG LA. And they apparently haven't decided what their pricing will be... maybe they'll have a fee structure ready in a few months.

• CNET article
• MPEG Advance site

Video on the Net (and let's be clear-- video's future is the Net) already suffers endless technology licensing problems. And the industry's solution is apparently even more licensing.

In case you've been living in a cave, Google has been trying to establish VP9 as a royalty- and strings-free alternative (new version release candidate just out this week!), and NetVC, our own next-next-generation royalty-free video codec, was just conditionally approved as an IETF working group on Tuesday and we'll be submitting our Daala codec as an input to the standardization process. The biggest practical question surrounding both efforts is 'how can you possibly keep up with the MPEG behemoth'?

Apparently all we have to do is stand back and let the dominant players commit suicide while they dance around Schroedinger's Cash Box.