How much will I pay for h.264 streaming?

0
votes

The actual question is straightforward:

Do I have to pay anything to the MPEG-LA consortium in order to encode and stream h.264 P2P videos?

The background:

My company runs a chat application that uses the flash media server suit for serving webcam data from a user to another (in a P2P fashion). We have many servers running the Adobe software and we want to get rid of it, specially since we want to focus on mobile users and flash is not the a viable choice for the future anymore.

After reading the h.264 license information (http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcweb.pdf) I still can't figure out if/when my company need to pay anything to MPEG-LA consortium. Theoretically, it it was possible, we wanted to just send the P2P data to both ends (the people actually chatting) and that would be it, but I don't know if it is possible with our current state of the web technologies.

1
flashvideovideo-streamingh.264webrtc

1 Answers

2
votes

IANAPL (I Am Not A Patent Lawyer)

P2P video chat (note I say chat, not streaming - they're different, and they're dealt with differently in the license IIRC) using H.264 does require someone to pay MPEGLA licenses. There are minimums and caps involved, and because it's MPEGLA unless you pay the cap (~$6.5M/year) you have to have some reliable way to count the number of users (to pay the license). In some cases, such as Flash and Windows 8, someone else has paid and provides the encoder/decoder to your software. Note that for chat uses, there is no royalty required for less than 100,000 instances/yr (but you have to be able to count them).

Alternatively, at some point next year, Cisco will be providing a downloadable module for H.264 (and paying the MPEGLA cap). This could be used in native apps (so long as a copy of the plugin is downloaded on installation or first use, not distributed with your app).

With regards to WebRTC, as reported in the press there is no decision yet on a mandatory video codec; current WebRTC implementations (Mozilla and Chrome) use VP8. Mozilla has said we will incorporate the Cisco plugin and provide both VP8 and H.264. Microsoft and Apple (when they add WebRTC) both would be able to include H.264 directly if they wish, since I think both already pay the cap. If you're using WebRTC as a JS app running in a browser, your app should not need an MPEGLA license - but remember, IANAPL