RE: [MPEGIF Discuss] MPEG LA Announces Terms of JointH.264/MPEG-4 AVC Patent License

Craig

Via announced terms long ago.  You can find them on Via's website at
www.vialicensing.com

Via's group's terms do not include use fees on DBS broadcasters or
terrestrial digital broadcasters for that matter.  It is
counterproductive for adoption of the technology and therefore for the
overall program to have terms like these that discourage content
production and distribution.

I too agree that any subscription based service provider as well as any
over the air (or through the atmosphere) broadcaster will have
difficulty including this in their business models.  The content
production, and content distribution industries are fundamentally
different in their business models from consumer electronics
manufacturers.  CE manufacturers include technologies that are supported
by the availability of relevant content in order to convince a customer
to buy their product instead of the product of a competitor.  In the
content production and content delivery industries, the specific
technology being used is not as directly related to obtaining and
retaining a customer.  Instead their model is based on the content that
is being delivered and how it is presented/organized (programming).  In
these cases, they have plenty of other costs that they incur including
speculative investment in new production or compilation of lots of
content that provides a greater scope of content availablity much of
which provides little return on investment.  It would be no more
acceptable (and no more outrageous) for the content production and
distribution industry to require technology providers to pay for the use
of a specific technology in the production and distribution process.
After all, the content industry could make the argument (and in fact in
some forums they have) that CE companies make money selling devices that
have no purpose other than to consume their content (DVD players, MP3
players) and therefore CE companies make money off their content without
"reimbursing" the content companies.  Each of these arguments are in
many ways equally fallacious.

The original MPEG 2 visual license struck a good balance between the two
industries.  Where the technology increased the distribution base and
customers for content (DVD) there was a sharing of that with the
creators of the enabling technologies (not just the encoding format, but
also several other areas of DVD production and operation).  AVC/H.264
has similar application to HD DVD and making download formats and
VOD/PPV much more IP network friendly and therefore much more possible
at higher quality with lower bandwidth.  It is those areas that it is
appropriate to share costs across the industries because it is across
industries that the customer acquisition and customer retention benefits
apply.  In the case of over the air broadcast or subscription services
that case is not so clear.  Especially where there are alternatives that
do not have these kinds of burdens.

The market will be the judge of these terms, but it would seem they have
all the potential of the MPEG 4 Part 2 license to discourage the
availability of professionally produced content and therefore limit the
application of the technology to consumer based capture devices (cell
phones, camcorders).  If that happens it will be a waste of a great
technology that has the real potential to unify compression technologies
across many different platforms.

Ron Moore



-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces-wvgAS0I8NaWTm/[email protected]
[mailto:discuss-bounces-wvgAS0I8NaWTm/[email protected]] On Behalf Of Craig Birkmaier
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2003 8:29 AM
To: rob.koenen-8/[email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: RE: [MPEGIF Discuss] MPEG LA Announces Terms of
JointH.264/MPEG-4 AVC Patent License


At 5:52 PM -0500 11/19/03, Rob Koenen \(MPEGIF\) wrote:
>Craig,
>
>>  My guess is that
>>  the DBS service providers are going to have a very difficult time  
>> dealing with the subscriber use fees...
>
>Could you provide a bit more detail on why this is the case? I'd like 
>to see facts and figures in this discussion.


As I understand it, both U.S. DBS providers and newsCorp have stated 
that they will not use any compression technology that charges use 
fees.

Nothing official here, just comments made at conferences, etc. I 
suspect that there will not be any official comments on this until 
Via announces their license terms.

Regards
Craig
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