Workingmac.com – QT Live keynote: Free the MPEG 4:
“According to [Phil]Schiller [Apple’s vice-president of worldwide marketing], ‘the technology is practically done,’ but its release is being held for licensing reasons. Apple, he says, is willing to pay codec royalties that add up to 2 million dollars a year. But the new licensing proposals from MPEGLA, the governing standards body over MPEG, ask for an additional royalty structure that is dependent upon content.The fee structure, as Schiller presented it during his keynote, is 2¢ per hour for the content host and 2¢ per hour for the content replicator. Distilled down, that means both providers and users will have to pay a fee for each instance of use over time.
Groans and boos from the audience helped to make Apple’s case clearer, and Schiller asked the audience to help. ‘Now is the time you can affect how this goes.’ He then put a slide with the email address-
licensing@mpegla.com-on the screen, and asked the audience to send their comments directly to the standards body.”
Follow-to yesterday’s posts. MPEG-4 has the potential to radically change the way educators concieve of video – for its creation and its use in the classroom at all levels. In one or two years – when computers are even more powerful and less expensive – the capability to watch and make multimedia will be even further ‘democratized.’ That means that most schools and homes will have computers capable of making and viewing high-quality video and multimedia, regardless of platform. QuickTime is positioned to be the primary inexpensive authoring tool; keep that in mind, and keep an eye on the MPEG-LA discussions. This will absolutely affect our everyday lives in three to five years.
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