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A bunch of tech industry giants just teamed up to fight for a new kind of video, and Apple is not in the group
(rpb1001/Flickr)
Tech titans Amazon, Netflix, Cisco, Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, and Intel have banded together as the Alliance for Open Media to come up with a new standard for online video.
First, some background:
When you buy a subscription to streaming video services like Netflix or Amazon Prime Instant Video, or an episode of TV or a movie from the Google Play store, a portion of your purchase goes into the pockets of an organization called MPEG LA.
MPEG LA is the company that collects the licesning fees for the patents to the AVC/H.264 codec technology, which is the nerdy-sounding but crucial bit of code that takes the original video and streams it to you in a way that your browser, phone, or TV can understand.
The technology is based on a bunch of patents held by companies including Sony and Panasonic, with MPEG LA acting as the company that collects the fees on behalf of the patent holders.
Even Cisco has to cough up a licensing fee for its enterprise videoconferencing services.
The MPEG LA group doesn't collect its patent royalties for video that's free to the end-user, which is part of why you don't have to pay to upload content to YouTube or other online video sites.
But a new, competing group called HEVC Advance says that its version of the next-generation High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, which provides mich higher performance than H.264, will also come with a much higher price tag.
MPEG LA also offers an HEVC-based codec, at a rate that's higher but comprable to what HEVC Advance holds. But if patent-holding companies choose to go with HEVC Advance instead of (or in addition to) MPEG LA, companies like Netflix could find themselves holding the bag for a much steeper patent licensing bill.
Rather than risk taking the hit and pass on those costs to the consumer, the tech companies have been working on their own streaming codecs, for which they wouldn't have to pay royalties. Google has its VP9 and VP10 engines, Cisco has Thor, and Mozilla has Daala.
(Elizabeth Fuentes/Getty)
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings
With the formation of this so-called Alliance for Open Media, the big tech companies say they're banding together to create a new standard codec that all works together for streaming video and still images, across any browser or device.
If they can all agree on a standard, they can put it into their respective browsers and devices without having to worry about compatibility, and so on. Otherwise, you could end up getting a lot of those annoying "You must be using Google Chrome/Internet Explorer/whatever" messages when you tried to watch a video.
One potential problem here, as identified by Ars Technica, is that building this standard will require the use of patented technology from each of its member organiziations. If any one of them chose to throw its weight around, it could potentially claim patent infringement from the other members.
Either way, it's a viable and arguably necessary escape hatch from complicated and costly patent licesnsing schemes, even if it might take some time for the Alliance's new standard to bear fruit.
Oh, and in case you were wondering: Apple uses the MP4 standard as the basis for videos sold on the Apple iTunes Store, and utilizes its own HTTP Live Streaming technology for anything streamed over the Internet, so it's been largely free of MPEG LA's clutches. That means Apple doesn't have much incentive to climb aboard this initiative.
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