A future without MPEG
MPEG passed away on 2020/06/02T16:30 CEST. The agony was long, but the result was predictable. The causes have partly to do with the nature of ISO whose main feature I describe in This is ISO – A feudal organisation.
I need to make 3 strong statements:
- Those who have created a new intellectual object have to right to exploit it
- Technology innovation is well rewarded by a system that identifies, determines and protects intellectual property (IP)
- Those who make available their IP to a technical specification declared standard by an official standards body have additional benefits compared to those who do not. They should have more obligations as well.
The competitors
When the MPEG-4 Visual licence sentenced the death penalty to the MPEG-4 Visual standard, competitors popped up. Four famous names are Real Networks, Microsoft, On 2 and Google. The fact that private companies could assemble a video codec of commercial value signaled that video coding was a maturing technology and that “anybody” could assemble a reasonably performing solution.
What the market offers
The market has not been idle. In 2015 an initial group of companies (Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix) have created Alliance for Open Media (AOM), initially targeting video. The AOM about page mentions 4 main features of the first specification AV1:
- Royalty-free ecosystem
- Patent review process and legal defense fund
- Cutting edge technologies
- Collaborative open source development.
... Most importantly, the market has come up with a solution – AV1 by the Alliance for Open Media – that is capable to provide decently performing specifications that are royalty free and promises a defence to an attacked member (with strings attached, but everybody looks at the next quarter, and does not consider the implications of a choice 5 years from now).
See the full story here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-without-mpeg-leonardo-chiariglione/?fbclid=IwAR3NVqdBWwhbfjUzLATU2Bp4H1sU-FjjeWXOSTU5th-FUpPdws9d-N5BrNE