Apple’s move last month to join the Alliance for Open Media and rumors that Samsung may follow have thrown the codec world into turmoil, prompting MPEG’s founder and chairman Leonardo Chiariglione into writing a blog urging desperate action to repair the broken codec licensing model before it collapses completely. This model enshrined by MPEG has served the digital media industry for 30 years, encouraging participating companies to invest in and donate Intellectual Property (IP) with high expectations of making a healthy profit. This has spawned a succession of standards, including MPEG-2 for digital TV in 1994, followed by AVC for reduced bitrate video in 2003 and finally in 2013 MPEG-H Part 2 or H.265, which has become better known as HEVC,…