Which competitor beats AV1 in licensing? VP9 matches it in licensing. No other codec beats it. Even Leonardo Chiariglione (founder and chairman of MPEG) says AV1's licensing has MPEG beat:
http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solut...
https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Art...
It is completely unlikely that AV1 infringes on none of them or any other patents.
However, there's a big giant gap between a valid patent and actually expecting to get royalties without even revealing which patents are supposedly being infringed on even now that AV1 is standardised and in production usage.
So do I think that AV1 is patent-free when all is said and done from a legal standpoint? No. Do I think it'll be royalty-free anyway? Yes.
Also:
> 1.3. Defensive Termination. If any Licensee, its Affiliates, or its agents initiates patent litigation or files, maintains, or voluntarily participates in a lawsuit against another entity or any person asserting that any Implementation infringes Necessary Claims, any patent licenses granted under this License directly to the Licensee are immediately terminated as of the date of the initiation of action unless 1) that suit was in response to a corresponding suit regarding an Implementation first brought against an initiating entity, or 2) that suit was brought to enforce the terms of this License (including intervention in a third-party action by a Licensee).
vs.
* JVC Kenwood Corporation * Koninklijke Philips N.V. * Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation * Orange S.A. * Toshiba IPR Solutions, Inc.
If they are intending to initiate any patent litigation (which is going to be a very long time yet not least of all because they won't even reveal which patents) I think they're going to be at a losing end very very quickly having waited this long for VP9/AV1 to establish themselves.
(Or a similar tort/breach. In Australia it would constitute a case of misleading or deceptive conduct under the ACL.)
Patent cases of this sort seem to broadly favour the litigant so why stir the hornet's nest.
For the cost of some legal fees, a loss seems like a great value.
To my eyes, there's a pretty decent chance that the Sisvel pool is an HEVC industry ploy to propagate FUD around AV1 and VP9 (suspiciously both, the latter seeming to have been the subject of no lawsuits, despite being deployed widely for about six years), to stop the bleeding w.r.t. HEVC licensing (which is still an absolute steaming dump in the lap of your legal department).
I'll believe it when I see the receipts, and even then, it'd probably be less of a minefield than HEVC. And to be fair Sisvel has not, in other industries, seemed to be a particularly insidious actor; but given the number of big fish who are obviously using VP9 encoders to do tens of billions of dollars of business without licensing anything from Sisvel, I can't see it as anything other than bluster.
Is this known to have ever been achieved?
Also all of this is applicable to countries where those patents are working, of course.
1. The difference between $0 and even the smallest license fee is essentially infinite; just the friction to track and collect license fees would basically kill off the open source ecosystem. Also, it really rubs some people the wrong way that you can get a complete operating system and hundreds of apps for free but a single modern video codec used to cost money.
2. Codec patent licenses are sometimes kind of trolly; some codecs want to charge fees per minute of video instead of per encoder/decoder which is an accounting nightmare and feels abusive.
Let us begin with the fact there are at least three different legal entities in which you have to talk with, each with different schemes:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P...
At least with H.264 you only had one.
I don't have a problem with paying license fees, it is just most of those companies don't agrees on it.
I could only wish we make the standard as free for Software Encode and Decode.
All Hardware Accelerated Encoder and Decode will be $0.5 per unit. And $0.3 for only Encoder Or Decoder. With no Caps.
For Mobile alone that is anywhere between $360M to $600M alone assuming all devices supports it. And if we include PC, Tablet, Console, All other accessories it is up to $1B per year, and for the life time of the Codec easily $10B+ in patents total split across all companies.
The consumer will be paying for it, and we all enjoy better video quality with smaller downloads. Unfortunately most of the sweet spot for newer codec tends to be in 4K or even 8K. I wish they could put a lot more focus on 1080P at 1 / 2Mbps. Where the vast majority of video on Internet could settle on.
It's no surprise then that AV1 (which is basically VP10) uses more resources, but compresses more, and that Netflix and Intel are keen to replace the libvpx derived encoder with their own implementation of the standard.
Just because something is open does not mean it is meant to serve consumers' interests.
And yet Netflix is working on SVT-AV1 with Intel, which is one of the fastest AV1 encoders available:
https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/introducing-svt-av1-a-sc...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/bxn2uw/svtav1_encoding...
https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1
How does that fit with your narrative?
Of course they do. Google wouldn't sell many Pixels if you could only watch half as much YouTube or Netflix on a single charge compared to, say, an iPhone. Netflix wouldn't sell many subscriptions if you could only watch half as much on a single charge as Hulu or Prime Video either. Your point about encoding is valid, but Google and Netflix are definitely incentivised towards low decoding complexity on the client.
Google and Twitch also care about encoding time, but in a different way - they have strong use cases for real time encoding being possible.
Everyone cares about decoding efficiency - Google wants you to be able to watch more videos and thus more ads. If your battery is dead, you can't watch any ads. Netflix wants you to get hooked on more series. etc.
> Just because something is open does not mean it is meant to serve consumers' interests.
This is true in general, but I really don't see how it applies to this case at all. The big companies have incentives that actually do line up pretty directly with user's interests.
"We will be satisfied with 20% efficiency improvement over HEVC when measured across a diverse set of content and would consider a 3-5x increase in computational complexity reasonable."
Encoding time takes a backseat.