Via Licensing Alliance (Via) has raised the license fee for the popular Advanced Video Coding (AVC) codec, better known as H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10, starting this year with a tiered structure based on the number of platform users. Previously, the fee was only $100,000 per year but has now increased to $4.5 million per year.
The structures introduced are OTT (over 100+ million subscribers), FAST (100+ million daily users), Social Media (over 1 billion MAU), cloud gaming (over 15 million MAU), satellite/cable TV (over 7.45 million subscribers) and OTA networks (over 125 million subscribers). The fee still starts at $100,000 per year for platforms with less than 100,000 subscribers.
The new payment plan is only applicable to platforms that do not have a previous license. Customers who are already licensed will remain on the old payment structure. The future impact is that new platforms will have to bear higher licensing costs. The longer-term impact is that this may popularize open source codecs such as AV1 (which YouTube and Netflix already use) and VP9.
For the average user, the impact will be that support for encoding video using H.264/AVC will be removed from the computers they buy. Last year, Acer and ASUS computers were banned from sale in Germany for not paying a license to use the H.265 codec to Nokia, which holds the patent. Acer and ASUS removed the ability to encode H.265 in that country because they refused to pay royalties.
Removing H.264 is more difficult because at this point it is a popular codec used in video editing software and is the backbone supporting video streaming on the internet.
