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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
Backers of a next-generation multimedia compression technology want to charge a controversial fee -- but instead their plan is fanning interest in free, open-source alternatives.
Mar 6, 2002 | On Jan. 31, the agency charged with licensing MPEG-4, a standard for digital audio and video compression, announced a series of new fees. Manufacturers of software programs that incorporate MPEG-4 would be required to pay 25 cents for each copy they sell (up to a cap of $1 million per year). More controversially, the alliance of companies pushing the MPEG-4 standard also proposed a "use fee" -- a 2 cents an hour charge that either users or manufacturers of the software would have to come up with.
Cooked up by an alliance of 18 consumer electronics companies called MPEG-LA, the MPEG-4 standard is aimed at online and wireless multimedia. As such it has the potential to cover everything from online games to interactive TV to the Internet streaming of music, TV shows and movies.
So if you were playing a game of online Doom III that made use of MPEG-4 or were watching a similarly encoded Internet broadcast of a Britney Spears concert, you might have to pay an extra toll, just for use of the compression technology.
Compression formulas squeeze data down to a size where it can be uploaded or downloaded quickly and painlessly. The MP3 format (technically MPEG-1, layer 3), for example, made downloading digital music over restricted bandwidth relatively easy. It's a technology no one considers sexy. But the stakes involved in controlling it are huge.
Right now, consumers of Web-broadcast audio and video typically choose among a variety of options -- Microsoft, Real and Apple all market media players that use their own proprietary compression techniques. The new MPEG-4 fee, some argue, will pave the way for the proprietary versions to further dominate the market. The consequences, especially if one version wins out over the others, could be immense. Imagine a world in which every online download makes use of the same proprietary digital format -- a product of, say, Microsoft. Companies seeking to improve on the standard would have to get Redmond's permission. AOL-Time-Warner, News Corp. and other international media giants would all have to pay a software company to serve up their own content.
Content companies have been working hard to avoid such a scenario and believed that MPEG-4, which supposedly was going to be an "open" standard, would save them. But MPEG-LA's new plan dashed the hopes of both the content companies and some other industry players. Apple, which had based its next release of the QuickTime media player on MPEG-4 technology, delayed the product's release to protest the terms.
"Everybody was looking forward to getting away from proprietary [compression formulas], then the licensing terms came out," says Frank Cassanova, director of product marketing for Apple's QuickTime. "It knocked the wind out of our sails."
The patent holders will end up being the biggest losers," says Robert Saint John, marketing director for Ligos, a streaming media company. "I'm afraid these [MPEG-LA] companies are shooting themselves in the foot. They're impeding the progress of MPEG-4 implementations over licensing issues, and they're only hurting themselves in the long run."
So far, the debate over MPEG-4's terms has been limited to only the established players: Real, Microsoft, Apple and the consumer electronics companies that own MPEG-4's patents. But there are also some fast-growing challengers to the big players: open-source software compression formulas in which the underlying code is made publicly available to anyone who wants it. Late last year, for example, a company called On2 open-sourced its VP3 multimedia software, and software developers are also hard at work on at least two other projects that aim to create cheaper, if not completely free, alternatives to MPEG-4 and Real and Microsoft's formats.
The debate over MPEG-4 has shaken the market, say experts. And instead of accepting MPEG-LA's expensive terms, or simply staying with the proprietary formats provided by Real, Microsoft and Apple, parts of the multimedia universe might do what the Net has always done best -- route completely around the problem.
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