Apple Delays QuickTime 6 Over Proposed MPEG-4 Licenses 245
znu writes: "Apple announced at the QuickTime Live! conference today that there's a public preview of QuickTime 6 with full MPEG-4 support ready to ship, but the terms of the proposed MPEG-4 license are holding it back. For those who haven't been following this, MPEG wants $0.25 per encoder/decoder for MPEG-4, up to $2 million per company per year. Apple is fine with that. But MPEG also wants content distributers to pony up $0.02/hour for any content that's distributed for profit. Apple feels that determining just what is "for profit" will be problematic, and that this pricing will seriously inhibit MPEG-4 adoption.
You are encouraged to complain to MPEG LA about this situation."
hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Just ignore mpeg-4 ... (Score:3, Insightful)
The foolishness of licenced standards (Score:3, Insightful)
Companies that have "crate patented standards and get rich off the licencing" as part of their buisiness plan should be shunned by those who are seeking to make money by providing entertainment or information.
I personally a mystified that things like this MPEG insanity can and have survived. Open standards have reigned supreme on the internet, and nearly everywhere else, but somehow these proprietary video compression algorithms live on.
I don't pretend to be an expert on video codec's and the like, but I would like to believe that some sane individuals could develop an open video compression system and stop all of this idiocy
My utopia (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I suggest that we all write nice letters to Mr. Futa and press our individual opinions.
Re:But How Long Can They Do It? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, if you want to know how long Apple can afford not to release the product, the answer is "forever": they can go with some other codec and rework the product. Then they can advertise that *their* system is free for use, unlike everyone else's.
Who should pay (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:hmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Most music lovers are going to migrate to MP3, some to OGG for their personal use, and if you're talking video, everyone has started using divx for ease of use, and b/c everyone else is using it ;) hell, we're individuals and its easier to use something that everyone else uses, too
Commercial companies are the problem here. If you go to a commercial site, they could be using any one of the formats for video, depending on what all-knowing management decided would be the best idea.
If you ask me, there's the rub.
Why Apple is Pissed (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has invested a large amount of money in the MPEG4 format [apple.com]. They're not named in the license [apple.com] that we're all talking about, so I assume that they're not receiving any royalties. This would piss me off, but it's not what's annoying them.
The problem that they have is that the $0.02 (I know... an ironic amount...) per hour that the user of an encoder has to pay is a barrier to the acceptance of their product.
Apple want to be the (consumer) media platform of choice. They have no illusions of making money from producers [apple.com].
Re:The foolishness of licenced standards (Score:4, Insightful)
Sadly, I can think of more contradictions to that statement than examples of it.
We are still using GIF, after all.
http://images.slashdot.org/title.gif {- See?
Oh, and there are a whole lot more more people using MP3 than Ogg.
Oh, and uh - Isn't Flash a pretty darn closed standard?
What about that Windows thing? I think it has a pretty wide installed user base. Doesn't it? Not to mention Internet Explorer.
Sorry, dude. I think your post was a bit off the mark. It's not that I don't agree that it would be nice if stuff was all free and opened and life was good and all, but uh -- well. It's not. Sucks plenty.
Brain dead licensing (Score:1, Insightful)
It seems with any format(audio,video,file compression) you want it out there and popular. Then only license the encoder, and the decoder is no charge. People will use the format a lot more, imho.
A Microsoft Ploy ? (Score:3, Insightful)
MPEG-4 is being rolled out for set-top boxes for Cable Companies. The MPEG-LA license fee would add a charge of almost $ 15.00 per box per month to your cable bill. This would just about double my cable bill. This will kill MPEG-4 if it is not changed.
The speculation is that this is Microsoft (a member of the license pool) trying to squelch competition, without leaving any fingerprints.
Re:The Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
A grey area, for certian, but one you can see why they'd want to avoid. I'm sure given how greedy many people seem to be getting these days that the MPEG group would try to slap them with a bill for all that content and they'd have to waste money fighting and perhaps paying it.
Will they never learn? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The foolishness of licenced standards (Score:4, Insightful)
At the time at which GIF became standard, the licensing issues were not known, so it appeared to be an open standard.
MP3 might be a closed standard, but at least no license fees are to be paid for distributing players (as far as I know, they're only required for encoders) or content.
Also note that, similar to GIF, when MP3 took off, encoders were developed without paying license fees as well. The license fees were not requested before MP3 already was popular, and even then, there was a lot of discussion about whether this would stop MP3. But there was no free alternative ready at that time.
No, it's not. It's documented similar to PDF. Besides, I wouldn't exactly call Flash an internet standard, it's more a marketing and salespeople standard ;-)
The original poster didn't claim that all implementations of the standards were free, but that the standards themselves were. IP, HTTP, HTML etc. are all open standards. The fact that they're implemented by proprietary products like Windows or Internet Explorer doesn't make the standards less open.
Re:Hopefully this will kill Quicktime (Score:2, Insightful)
Personaly, Quicktime is highly efficient. True if you want to watch MPEGS full screen, you need to register, but as you so pointed out, there are hacks availible.
Executive Summary (Score:3, Insightful)
Simply put:
MPEG-LA is a company that represents the patent holders of technolgy used by all the parts of a multimedia standard known as MPEG-4.
MPEG-LA says that if you want to sell a codec that infringes on any of their _extensive_ patents, you need to pay $0.25 per copy sold, up to $1M per year.
MPEG-LA says that if you want to USE a codec covered by their patents, you have to pay $0.02/hr per stream.
Apple refuses to make QuickTime 6 available until the usage fee is removed.
IMHO:
This is awesome, Apple is standing up for the rights of the individual to create multimedia content and publish it royalty free. Sure, they're saving themselves some $ since they stream video too. But consumers will be the ones paying that $0.02/hr if it sticks, via their Digital Cable subscription, their DirectTV subscription, watching streaming movies on the net, etc...
The $0.25 per codec sold is fair. Many of you might not think the underlying patents are fair, but that's a different issue. If the patents are fair, then it seems fair to charge $0.25 a copy for any other products sold that infringe on the patents.
-pmb