2014年6月4日
By 1月时特约编辑
专题文章

MPEG LA's HEVC Licensing Terms Are Flawed, Will Prevent Adoption

你可能知道，MPEG - LA 宣布了HEVC的授权条款早在一月份. At the time, I thought, as most observers did, that those terms would provide long-needed certainty. 经过进一步思考, 我认为它们有缺陷，而且会拖延, 如果不是预防, HEVC在流媒体领域的应用. For HEVC to flourish there, MPEG LA needs to dramatically revamp the structure for free players.

It’s not that I’m joining the “internet should be free” crowd, heaven forbid. 而, 在目前的版税结构下, it seems unlikely that free HEVC decode will become available anytime soon, which is necessary to jump start HEVC in the streaming space.

让我们从提议的条款开始. Briefly, MPEG LA opted for a “flat tax” system: $0.20 per unit of HEVC products distributed by a legal entity to end users. 你们最多可以装运100个,每年1000台，不收版税, 每年最高版税为2500万美元, 哪个会随着时间的推移而增加, though there is no royalty for any content encoded with HEVC. All this is before the potential for payments to companies that aren’t in the MPEG LA group, 据报道包括微软, 东芝, 杜比, 夏普和三星, 据CNET报道.

是结构化的, 100年,000 minimum gives a pass to most vendors selling HEVC encoders, very few of which other than Adobe and Apple come close to this number. 在光谱的另一端, there are just a few companies that will benefit from the maximum -- after all, 你必须运送125个.100万台才能到达. 在流媒体领域, 这就是浏览器公司, 像苹果, 谷歌, 微软和Mozilla, 加上Adobe, 这个故事是从哪里开始的.

解释一下，我最近在阅读 《百家乐软件》 在引入创意云之后, Adobe’s net profit dropped from around $200 million per quarter to $47 million for Q1 2014. Don’t despair -- the share price has doubled from ~$30 to ~$60. The stock market likes business models with recurring revenue.

当天晚些时候, 为即将到来的HEVC演讲做准备, I was wondering what was keeping Adobe from adding HEVC playback to Flash. Then the $25 million maximum and the $47 million net income came together, and I realized that any quarter that Adobe added HEVC playback to Flash could result in more than a 50 percent drop in net earnings. Imagine that conversation between the Flash product manager and the financial types.

当Adobe加入H.264 to Flash, the maximum was much lower and Flash was a crown jewel in Adobe’s product stable. 今天, Adobe is focusing more on HTML5 playback and promoting Adobe Primetime, 它的优质内容分发平台.

从这个角度看, it’s almost impossible to see Adobe adding HEVC playback to the Flash Player; what precisely is the benefit to Adobe? It’s like we’re expecting Adobe to pay the royalty so encoding vendors can sell royalty-free HEVC encoding products and services, and so Netflix and ESPN can stream royalty-free HEVC-encoded streams (and save massive bandwidth costs). That’s why Adobe announced at NAB that it will support 4K in Primetime, 在哪里可以收回授权成本, 但不是Flash播放器. Which obviously does nothing to promote HEVC for general-purpose playback.

真正的, if the HEVC patent holders make the distribution of free HEVC decoders royalty-free, they will lose big numbers from companies like Adobe. 他们可以通过失去100来弥补一部分损失,000 minimum and boosting the royalty for encoders, 或者——喘口气——对内容收取版税. Or they could reduce the maximum for free decoders. Or perhaps the royalty group could give a single exception to Adobe, given its singular ability to jumpstart the market, 尽管这些选择似乎都不太可能.

如果我是对的, HEVC really won’t become relevant for general purpose streaming anytime in the foreseeable future.

本文发表于2014年6月号 流媒体杂志 作为“不要指望免费的HEVC解码很快.”