What are the MPEG-4/AVC/H.264 licensing terms?
Via Licensing and MPEG LA announced outline terms last October and November respectively. The terms are very reasonable. Royalties aren’t owed on systems until next year. We’ll be paying less than $1 per encoder or decoder. We also care about the royalties that other industry participants, such as broadcasters, content publishers and PC software vendors, will be paying, and they’re similarly reasonable. The good news is that licensing fees are a non-issue for AVC. NOTE: the Japanese broadcasters have just announced a deal with MPEG-LA which covers free-to-air terrestrial/sat/and cable services. This involves a one-time license fee of $2,500 per encoder, but there are no usage charges. Many of us hope that this one-time fee structure is adopted throughout the rest of the world, although that $2,500 will increase the price of our encoder products.
