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MPEG-4 as a forgotten footnote

 

By Scott Bradner

 

In an apparent triumph of greed over common sense the folks who are working out the licensing fees for MPEG-4 have decided to charge a per-minute, per-user fee for the use of the technology and to set the fee at a level that should ensure that MPEG-4 will become a forgotten footnote in the history of technology.

 

MPEG-4 is the latest in the services of technologies from the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) dealing with support for multimedia in a digital world. MPEG-4, according to the licensing group, "enables integration of the production, distribution and content access features of digital television, interactive graphics applications and interactive multimedia across internet protocol, wireless, low bitrate, broadcast, satellite, cable and mobile environments"

 

Like many standards in these days of a surfeit of patents, there is a complex tangle of intellectual property rights (IPR) underlying MPEG-4. At least 18 companies claim that their IPR is impinged by the standard. In a good move, the MPEG folk have worked out a way to have a single license which will cover all of the IPR. Implementers and users of MPEG-4 ( http://www.mpegla.com/mpeg4/news_release31Jan2002.html)

 

I do not want to argue that the MPEG-4 technology should be available for free. It would have been nice if they had been able to use technology that had no IPR claimants on it but that is getting harder and harder these days.

 

 Charging a 25 cent licensing fee for each personal use MPEG-4 encoder or decoder seems to me to be not unreasonable. Personal use is defined as being where no content owner or service provider is paid in any way for the material. It does mean that there will be no freeware MPEG-4 systems for personal use and that will be a shame but not a killer in and of itself. And, two cents per hour of prerecorded material, like a DVD, also seems to be unlikely to be the determining factor in deciding if MPEG-4 will be used for pre recorded material.

 

But a fee of two cents per hour per viewer for streaming content over the Internet seems to designed to ensure technological irrelevance. As an example, this fee structure would mean that if Victoria's Secret had used MPEG-4 for their last 44 minute webcast, seen by 2 million people, they would have had to pay about $30,000 - not bad for Victoria's Secret but what about CNN.com's coverage of September 11th? Many millions of people watched that advertising supported service for hours at a time. Would CNN have offered it if it had to multiply the losses it already has on the service?

 

It seems to me that the MPEG-4 IPR holders would do just fine if they charged a reasonable, but significant, flat fee for commercial encoders instead of the streaming usage fee. But if they insist on user-based fee for streaming I expect an alternative with a better fee structure will be developed and only historians will remember MPEG-4.

 

disclaimer: I doubt that Harvard's historians care about MPEG-4 so the above is me pretending to care. MPEG-4 as a forgotten footnote

 

In an apparent triumph of greed over common sense the folks who are working out the licensing fees for MPEG-4 have decided to charge a per-minute, per-user fee for the use of the technology and to set the fee at a level that should ensure that MPEG-4 will become a forgotten footnote in the history of technology.

 

MPEG-4 is the latest in the services of technologies from the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) dealing with support for multimedia in a digital world. MPEG-4, according to the licensing group, "enables integration of the production, distribution and content access features of digital television, interactive graphics applications and interactive multimedia across internet protocol, wireless, low bitrate, broadcast, satellite, cable and mobile environments"

 

Like many standards in these days of a surfeit of patents, there is a complex tangle of intellectual property rights (IPR) underlying MPEG-4. At least 18 companies claim that their IPR is impinged by the standard. In a good move, the MPEG folk have worked out a way to have a single license which will cover all of the IPR. Implementers and users of MPEG-4 ( http://www.mpegla.com/mpeg4/news_release31Jan2002.html)

 

I do not want to argue that the MPEG-4 technology should be available for free. It would have been nice if they had been able to use technology that had no IPR claimants on it but that is getting harder and harder these days.

 

 Charging a 25 cent licensing fee for each personal use MPEG-4 encoder or decoder seems to me to be not unreasonable. Personal use is defined as being where no content owner or service provider is paid in any way for the material. It does mean that there will be no freeware MPEG-4 systems for personal use and that will be a shame but not a killer in and of itself. And, two cents per hour of prerecorded material, like a DVD, also seems to be unlikely to be the determining factor in deciding if MPEG-4 will be used for pre recorded material.

 

But a fee of two cents per hour per viewer for streaming content over the Internet seems to designed to ensure technological irrelevance. As an example, this fee structure would mean that if Victoria's Secret had used MPEG-4 for their last 44 minute webcast, seen by 2 million people, they would have had to pay about $30,000 - not bad for Victoria's Secret but what about CNN.com's coverage of September 11th? Many millions of people watched that advertising supported service for hours at a time. Would CNN have offered it if it had to multiply the losses it already has on the service?

 

It seems to me that the MPEG-4 IPR holders would do just fine if they charged a reasonable, but significant, flat fee for commercial encoders instead of the streaming usage fee. But if they insist on user-based fee for streaming I expect an alternative with a better fee structure will be developed and only historians will remember MPEG-4.

 

disclaimer: I doubt that Harvard's historians care about MPEG-4 so the above is me pretending to care.