MPEG-4 Video Has Become A Three Ringed Circus
by Timothy Everingham, NOCCC, teveringham@acm.org - July 08, 2002 at 18:07:52:
We currently have three proprietary standards for Internet video: Windows Media, Real Video, and QuickTime. Of course with such proprietary standards there becomes an issue of interoperability, which leads to having to potentially have servers and/or players for each one. So why not create an international video standard for the Internet like the MPEG 1 & 2 standards used on CDs and DVDs. Enter MPEG-4. An international standards committee developed it. Of course one of the problems with doing it that way is it takes longer. With Internet video technology changing at an extremely rapid pace, by the time the standard was agreed up it was two years behind current technology the proprietary standards were using. However, with some updates it still looked good to many because the content providers would only have to encode and manage one format instead of three and some quick updates could be added to bridge some of the technology gap. Apple was one of those companies. They announced last June at the Streaming Media West Conference that they were throwing their lot with MPEG-4 and was no longer going to do developing for QuickTime Internet video. They are now regretting that decision.It was assumed that like MPEG 1 & 2, that once the standard was set there would not be significant licensing issues regarding the patents that are part of the standards. However, MPEG 1 & 2 was developed in a different environment, especially economic. Technology companies have been really hurting and are under pressure to increase revenues. This includes royalty payments from patents. The patent holders of MPEG-4 for video portion decided to use the same patent licensing house to do a group licensing on MPEG-4 as MPEG-2 had used, MPEG LA. This way it would make it more convenient to license the technology than going through all the approximately 20 companies involved. However, in January when the licensing proposal came out there was a firestorm. They had included a per stream (viewer) fee and the accompanying record keeping that went with it. There were claims that this licensing went in violation of the international agreements that the standard was developed under. Deployment was stopped. In February Apple was going to release its QuickTime 6, which included MPEG-4; but the uncertainty regarding the licensing issues had made them put the release on hold.
There was a forum on MPEG-4 licensing on April 25 at the Spring Internet World/Streaming Media West Conference. The forum was expected to be hot, but that was an understatement. The moderator was from Philips Electronics, one of the patent holders. He could not get his laptop to work with the LCD projector properly, so he had to turn it over to the rep from MPEG LA to go over the licensing proposal. Right after that the moderator started to have the panelists do their opening statements. First was the Apple rep, who made it clear that Apple was furious over the licensing mess which had prevent the shipping of its products. The next speaker opened up with calling the licensing organization in violation of antitrust laws, he had sicked the Federal Department of Justice and several States’ Attorney Generals on them which where currently investigating MPEG LA, and intimated that he was considering filling suit against them. A person from Dolby Labs representing the audio portion of MPEG-4 patent holder spoke and was received as having a fair licensing proposal for audio. The group licensing organization rep spoke trying to calm everybody down with saying that these proposals were preliminary and a new proposal was being worked on because of all the criticism of the first one. Also she and the moderator said that you do not have to go through the group licensing organization to license the technology. Other speakers on the panel expressed frustration and tried to find common ground for agreement. Questions from the floor were received early in the session, and one of the first persons from the floor to speak was the Chief Technology Officer of Real Networks, makers of Real Audio and Video. He confronted the moderator from Philips Electronics saying that Philips and a number of other companies are not willing to discuss licensing their technology individually, so to get a license on one of the technologies you have to license the entire group of MPEG LA’s MPEG-4 patents. As such, the statements about not having to go through MPEG LA made by the moderator earlier were false. Neither the moderator nor the rep from MPEG LA denied the accusation. The CTO of Real Networks then charged that the people involved in creating the standard were getting preferential treatment by the patent holders, which is a violation of antitrust laws. At this point the moderator seemed to lose credibility with most of the panelists and the audience and lost the ability to guide the discussion, but only able to keep it so only one person talking at a time. The rest of the comments during the session were ones of animosity or frustration. Near the end one of the people in the audience expressed her frustration by saying that in her viewpoint that we would not be able to use some great technology because the licensing issues cannot be agreed upon. The session ended in frustration on the edge of chaos.
The night before the MPEG-4 licensing forum, the CEO of Real Networks spoke at the conference. He said that if MPEG-4 cannot get its licensing issues settled soon, MPEG-4 will become irrelevant. With what happened at the MPEG-4 licensing forum and the threat of legal action that could last for years, the odds are that MPEG-4 will become irrelevant and we will see few devices and software using it.
Timothy Everingham
He is CEO of Timothy Everingham Consulting in Azusa, California. He is also the member of the Executive Council of the Los Angeles Chapter of SIGGRAPH, the largest chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery’s(ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques and one of Southern California’s significant professional organizations within the entertainment and media industries. He is also on the Management Information Systems Program Advisory Board of California State University, Fullerton; which he also graduated from with honors with the double majors of Management Information Systems and Accounting. In addition he is the Vice President of the Windows Media Users’ Group of Los Angeles. He is also part-time press in the areas of high technology, video, audio, and entertainment/media and has had articles published throughout the United States and Canada. He is a member of North Orange County Computer Club.
Further information can be found at http://home.earthlink.net/~teveringham
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