Ever since the AV1 video codec was conceived around 2015 as a successor to VP9, there have been disruptive disputes over patent rights and royalties. In 2018, the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) launched AV1 onto the video scene with the promise of being royalty-free, but it wasn’t long before patent licensing programs emerged on intellectual property management website Sisvel – and in recent weeks those have evolved into a fully-fledged AV1 patent pool. Fundamentally, the building blocks for video have remained the same for three decades, the product of extensive cross-industry collaboration and patent sharing, even while their target connections and devices have proliferated – including to mobile broadband of course. Codec R&D does not come investment-free and so…