Royalty-Free MPEG Proposals Announced

MPEG has announced it has received proposals for a royalty-free MPEG standard and has settled on a deliberation process to consider them.

The press release is here; the underlying meeting resolution is here.  Relevant portions are copied below.

A short analysis of the proposals is available at: MPEG Plus or Patent Pool Lite? MPEG Mulls Royalty-Free Proposals.

From ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 N12258, December 2011 – Geneva, CH:

MPEG continues toward royalty-free video coding

At its 98th meeting, MPEG received responses to the Call for Proposals on Internet Video Coding Technologies. As a result, two tracks towards royalty-free video coding are being pursued. One track, called IVC, focuses on developing a standard based on MPEG-1 technology which is believed a safe royalty-free baseline that can be enhanced by additional unencumbered technology described in MPEG-2, JPEG, research publications and innovative technologies which are promised to be subject to royalty-free licenses. A second track, called WebVC, is driven by stakeholders of AVC technology. WebVC focuses on the constrained baseline profile from the widely used AVC standard (Rec. ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10). Proponents of WebVC have indicated that they hope to convince stakeholders to grant a royalty-free license for this technology, which was originally standardized in 2003.

Depending on the progress of the two tracks, MPEG will decide, in 2012, whether to choose IVC or WebVC to become an International Standard.

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From Resolutions, the 98th SC 29/WG 11 Meeting, 2011-11-28/12-02, Geneva, Switzerland  [SC 29/WG 11 N 12254:

3.11        Part 29 Web Video Coding

3.11.1        The Requirements and Video subgroups thank Apple, Cisco, Fraunhofer HHI, Magnum Semiconductor, Polycom, and RIM for their response to the CfP on Internet Video Coding.

3.11.2        The Requirements subgroup recommends that proponents of technology for Web Video Coding further improve the support for their proposal in order to meet market needs as identified in the IVC CfP.

3.11.3        The video subgroup recommends to approve of the following documents

3.11.4        The availability of N12366 and its publication may be delayed if the Video chairs consider the working draft not sufficiently mature.

15.3        Internet Video Coding

15.3.1        The Requirements and Video subgroups thank HKUST, Peking University, Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University for their response to the CfP on Internet Video Coding.

15.3.2        The Video subgroup recommends approval of the following documents:

15.3.3        The Requirements subgroup recommends that MPEG members make WG 11 aware of market developments in the space addressed by IVC.

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