I wonder if the big players creating the hardware are part of these patent collectives and are also receiving some of these licensing fees. That would be a good way to keep smaller competitors out of an industry.
I work for a rather large company that works with audio and video and we used Opus but have since switched to a Dolby based audio stack as it offers much better sound quality, reduced transmission bitrate and is generally more robust. However this needs a direct involvement with Dolby and not just of the shelf stuff.
So Dolby has some sort of audio compression method much better than the state of the art that they are keeping secret? Why would they do this?