> As an industry, we hope that the HEVC licensors come up with a reasonable and fair solution to resolving the patent licensing issues.
I don't think anyone cares about that (besides said patent holders). As an industry, we should hope that HEVC and its approach to licensing will go bust for good, and everyone will be using free codecs that will unshackle them from patent protection racket.
It's not just patent holders who care. Harmonic sells products where a large portion of the cost is derived from licensing codecs like AVC and HEVC. One of their contribution encoders[1] has separate software licensing for a variety of subsampling ratios.
They're not licensing codecs, they're licensing different versions of their software. The HEVC fee is only 20 cents per encoder, but I'll guess those video software options are thousands of dollars each.
While HEVC fees are only a tiny fraction of their encoders, they are far greater than 20 cents. Adding two of the pools together already nets up to $1.40, and there are more pools with unannounced pricing yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P...
Not among the powerful, no. The public gets great benefit from FLOSS codecs (Opus, VPx, AV1, etc.) and containers anyone is free to implement without patent hassles (such as Matroska and the smaller variant used in WebM). Patent holders usually try to wrangle control of everyone (Apple being a part of a media codec patent-holding group meant Apple pushed those codecs and back when people cared what Apple picked that meant more power for Apple). In this respect, it's a class issue.
In 1990 IBM (in "Think" magazine, #5) said they got considerably more value from cross-licensing than fees (in other words, looking at this in terms of money is wrongheaded) because cross-licensing gives them access to ideas). So, it's the power to control one's competition at play as well. This arrangement means (as Richard Stallman pointed out in essays and talks years ago found online in https://audio-video.gnu.org/video/rms-vub-2011-02-22.ogv ) that the entire temporary monopoly one ostensibly gets from the patent system is a sham, a myth. Organizations that hold a lot of patents can always find ways to economically compel smaller patent holders into cross-licensing, thus eliminating any real value of patenting ideas for most.
I don't think anyone cares about that (besides said patent holders). As an industry, we should hope that HEVC and its approach to licensing will go bust for good, and everyone will be using free codecs that will unshackle them from patent protection racket.