OSNews

Let's take a snippet from the MPEGLA press release[1] you provided: "# Internet broadcast (non-subscription, not title-by-title) – Since this market is still developing, no royalties will be payable for internet broadcast services (non-subscription, not title-by-title) during the initial term of the license (which runs through December 31, 2010) and then shall not exceed the over-the-air free broadcast TV encoding fee during the renewal term.

Another licensing issue that is often overlooked is the ambiguity of MPEG LA's future patent royalty collection plans. MPEG LA has established broadcast fees that licensees will be required to pay for distributing free (or ad-supported) streaming video content on the Internet. These fees will not be instated until the end of 2010, when the second H.264 licensing period goes into effect. The language used in the current license treats Internet streaming just like over-the-air television, implying that the licensees will have to pay broadcast fees per-region. That could prove to be extremely costly for Internet video providers who make their content available around the world.

MPEG LA has provided no guidance, clarification, or insight into what the broadcast licensing fees will look like. When asked directly about the issue, MPEG LA representatives say that they haven't even decided yet themselves. The worry is that H.264 licensing for content distributors could potentially become too costly to sustain widespread use for streaming Internet video.

The extent to which Theora lags behind H.264 is often overstated and the codec is, in actuality, in better shape than is generally thought by many of its critics. Google open source programs manager Chris DiBona is skeptical, however, and articulated the search giant's concerns about Theora's compression efficiency during the debate on the WHATWG mailing list.

"If [YouTube] were to switch to Theora and maintain even a semblance of the current YouTube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the internet," DiBona said. "The most recent public number was just over 1 billion video streams a day, and I've seen what we've had to do to make that happen, and it is a staggering amount of bandwidth."

DiBona's quality claim was broadly disputed by Theora supporters on the mailing list. Mozilla's Mike Shaver encouraged DiBona to examine the most recent Theora developments, suggesting that the latest improvements have helped to significantly close the gap in compression efficiency.

"I don't think the bandwidth delta is very much with recent (and format-compatible) improvements to the Theora encoders," he wrote. "[Codec improvements] are a big part of what we've been funding, and the results have been great already. I'd like to demonstrate them to you, because I suspect that you'd be a better-armed advocate within Google for unencumbered video if you could see what it's really capable of now."

Xiph's Gregory Maxwell responded to DiBona's mailing list post by publishing a comparison that aims to demonstrate Theora's efficacy relative to H.264 in the context of YouTube-quality streaming video.

"Using a simple test case I show that Theora is competitive and even superior to some of the files that Google is distributing today on YouTube," he wrote. "Theora isn't the most efficient video codec available right now. But it is by no means bad, and it is substantially better than many other widely used options. By conventional criteria Theora is competitive. It also has the substantial advantage of being unencumbered, reasonable in computational complexity, and entirely open source. People are often confused by the correct observation that Theora doesn't provide the state of the art in bitrate vs quality, and take that to mean that Theora does poorly when in reality it does quite well."