H.264 video: royalty-free forever
The outlook just got a lot rosier for the adoption of HTML5.
MPEG LA has announced that the h.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10) video coding standard will remain royalty-free forever, as long as video encoded with the standard is free to end users. This means sites like YouTube and Vimeo will never be charged licensing fees to serve video on the web. It also means that a huge hurdle has been removed for companies who had concerns about moving away from Flash video to HTML5 and the h.264 video standard.
Up to now MPEG LA’s position on licensing had been that h.264 would be royalty-free through 2015; after that, who knows. So prior to today’s news it was possible that licensing fees would kick in within a few years, and it’s difficult to promote a standard with that kind of uncertainty around a key technology. The uncertainty is now gone.
I think HTML5 will be good for the web and mobility, so I’m glad to see this decision.
Link to MPEG LA’s News Release (PDF)
Posted: August 26th, 2010Filed under: Competition, Video Tags: html5, vimeo | No Comments »
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