Friday, March 9, 2012

MPEG LA offers patent license for 3D video

MPEG LA offers patent license for 3D video | Deep Tech - CNET News CNET News @import "http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/Ads/common/css/SponsoredTextLink/sponsoredTextLink.live.css"; Manage Packages With UPS My Choice Home Reviews Cell Phones Camcorders Digital Cameras Laptops TVs Car Tech Forums Appliances Cell Phone Accessories Components Desktops E-book Readers Games and Gear GPS Hard Drives & Storage Headphones Home Audio Home Video Internet Access Monitors MP3 Players Networking and Wi-Fi Peripherals Printers Software Tablets Web Hosting You are here: News Latest News Mobile Startups Cutting Edge Media Security Business Tech Health Tech Crave Apple Microsoft Politics & Law Gaming & Culture Blogs Video Photos RSS Download Windows Software Mac Software Mobile Apps Web Apps The Download Blog CNET TV How To Computers Home Theater Smartphones Tablets Web Marketplace Log In | Join Log In Join CNET Sign in with My profile Log out
CNET News Deep Tech MPEG LA offers patent license for 3D video Stephen Shankland by Stephen Shankland February 25, 2012 3:02 AM PST Follow @stshank

Building the MVC technology for 3D video into a Blu-ray player will cost 10 cents per device, and selling discs costs a penny a pop, according to newly released licensing terms.

MPEG LA logo

MPEG LA, an organization that licenses digital video technology patents on behalf of their owners, has announced terms for using a 3D video encoding technology called MVC.

MVC (Multiview Video Coding) is used in Blu-ray disc players, personal computers, video cameras, software, and other situations calling for 3D video. It's what's known as a codec, a specification for encoding and decoding video so it can be stored more compactly or streamed more efficiently across networks.

MPEG LA debuted the MVC license agreement terms at the Asia-Pacific 3D Standards & IP (Intellectual Property) Forum in Seoul, South Korea, yesterday.

For companies that want to use something like MVC, licensing a patent pool is more convenient than hammering out agreements from a host of individual patent holders. But MPEG LA, which also licenses a patent pool for the widely used H.264 video codec, isn't free of controversy. Google is trying to promote a royalty-free video codec called VP8 that competes with H.264, but MPEG LA is investigating whether to offer a patent pool for VP8 and says so far it's found 12 organizations with patents that bear on VP8.

For MVC, there are a variety of ways to pay for the patent license. Each method limited to a maximum of $6.5 million annually:

? A payment of 10 cents per unit for products that include MVC;

? A payment of 1 cent per Blu-ray disc or 1 percent of the price, whichever is lower, though titles shorter than 12 minutes are free;

? Various payments for subscription services to with an unlimited number of titles using MVC, ranging from free for services with less than 100,000 annual subscribers to $300,000 for services with more than 25 million annual subscribers.

A sizeable list of organizations hold patents essential to using MVC, MPEG LA said: Dolby Laboratories; Fraunhofer; Fujitsu; Hewlett-Packard; Hitachi; Koninklijke; LG Electronics;Mitsubishi Electric Corporation; Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT); NTT Docomo; Panasonic; Sharp; Sony; Columbia; and Thomson Licensing.

Posted by Ambar jaiswal at 7:07 AM
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