MPEG LA, the group that oversees licensing for a number of Internet media standards, today announced that Internet broadcast content using the H.264 video coding standard will remain royalty-free for the entire life of the license, quashing fears that the standard could suddenly become subject to royalty payments in 2016 after the current licensing term expires and is required to be renewed.
H.264 is the video content standard that has been embraced by a broad array of content providers including Apple, which owns several of the patents included in the technology's portfolio. Today's announcement also paves the way for H.264 to become the standard video format for HTML5, which had seen some contributors, such as Mozilla and Opera, supporting Ogg Theora as a royalty-free video standard.MPEG LA announced today that its AVC Patent Portfolio License will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as "Internet Broadcast AVC Video") during the entire life of this License. MPEG LA previously announced it would not charge royalties for such video through December 31, 2015, and today's announcement makes clear that royalties will continue not to be charged for such video beyond that time.
Earlier this year, Google announced its own video standard, WebM, claiming that it would be a royalty-free alternative to H.264. Questions were raised, however, about whether WebM truly could be royalty-free, with MPEG LA even going as far as to suggest that it was looking into putting together a patent pool to assert the rights of intellectual property holders associated with the WebM/VP8 standard.
Article Link: MPEG LA Declares H.264 Standard Permanently Royalty-Free