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 a royalty-free codec was always an almost impossible mission for AOMedia – despite being a consortium of some of the world’s most powerful technology firms.
Now, Sisvel has announced nine new members of its Video Coding Licensing Platform for AV1 and VP9, welcoming Dolby, Ericsson, ETRI, GE, SK Telecom, InterDigital, IP Bridge, NTT Docomo and Xylene. They join original members JVC Kenwood, NTT, Orange, Philips and Toshiba, which initially approached Sisvel with their intellectual property claims.
While most AOMedia member companies have the means to profit from AV1 adoption in other ways, such as through hardware sales or streaming service uptake, smaller vendors with AV1 IP claims do not. Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix and Samsung are among the founding members of AOMedia, and clearly have other ways to monetize their innovations.
But the 14 challengers are seeking AV1 royalties via the following pricing structure:
- Consumer display device: Standard Rate = €0.32 ($0.35), Compliant Rate = €0.24 ($0.26)
- Consumer non-display device: Standard Rate = €0.11 ($0.12), Compliant Rate = €0.08 ($0.09)
According to the guidelines, a consumer display device includes any product capable of enabling visual demonstration or presentation of data and/or images, including smartphones, tablets, notebooks, computers, convertibles, TVs, VR/AR devices, video projectors and cameras (with displays).
Consumer non-display devices, meanwhile, cover any consumer products that are not capable of enabling visual demonstration or presentation of data and/or images, such as set-tops, gaming consoles, dongles, decoders and players, home theaters and streaming media players, cameras (without displays), desktop PCs (without displays) and graphics cards.
Sisvel expects as many as 2,000 patents will be submitted for license relating to AV1 and a further 1,000 for VP9.
Its CEO Mattia Fogliacco is confident that AOMedia members will relent. “When AOMedia looks at the list of the members we represent, they will realize that the reality is quite a bit different compared to what they imagine it to be. They will realize that the pricing is fair and that we did a thorough job of internal screening with accredited third parties and by our own technical domain experts in establishing a technical foothold for the patents,” he said.
When the AV1 patent pool was formed last year, AOMedia criticized it for “endorsing an environment of high patent royalty requirements and licensing uncertainty that would limit the potential of free and open online video technology”.
Two weeks into January, Wireless Watch’s sister service, Faultline – which provides weekly analysis of the digital video markets – predicted that the codec wars would reignite this year, after Huawei joined one of the three patent pools related to AV1’s rival, HEVC (or H.265, the successor to the ubiquitous H.264 or MPEG-4.
One of those pools, HEVC Advance, was awoken from its slumber by the arrival of Huawei as a member – an encouraging sign for HEVC patent holders as AV1 fever has taken hold in recent years, stimulated this year by Netflix’s adoption of AV1 for Android.
HEVC patents have fragmented into three pools, with newcomer Velos Media pitted against HEVC Advance and the veteran MPEG LA, presenting a confusing and risky picture for potential users. Fragmentation has in fact given oxygen to the AV1 movement far more than arguable and sometimes spurious claims of performance gains over HEVC.
At least AV1 only has one patent pool so far, but its entire raison d’etre as a fully royalty-free video codec, and alternative to the MPEG system, has now been thrown into doubt. It remains to be seen how much difference that makes to its adoption, given the state of confusion over in HEVC. And with the current virus-driven boom in video streaming, Netflix’s support for AV1 Android could be more impactful than ever.
In February, Faultline described how adoption of the AV1 codec was set to skyrocket after Netflix added AV1 support on Android smartphones via a new Data Saving feature. Only select titles are available to stream in AV1, but it seems likely, in the current situation, that Netflix will be busy encoding a larger share of its library in AV1 to reduce bandwidth congestion. Netflix has reported 20% compression efficiency gains by replacing VP9 with AV1, even though AV1 decoding is 30% more complex than VP9 or AVC.
If indeed Netflix is planning to accelerate its use of AV1, then support for Apple devices may come sooner than expected and rival streaming service providers may be encouraged to follow suit. However, Apple’s Safari browser still does not support VP9, while YouTube itself does not support HEVC 4K streaming, meaning no YouTube 4K video streaming for Safari users.
Netflix’s AV1 Android roll-out follows on from its work with VP9, released as part of its mobile encodes in 2016 and further optimized with shot-based encodes in 2018. After deploying per-title encoding in 2015, this shot-based encoding framework, called Dynamic Optimizer, gave Netflix capabilities for more granular optimizations with a video stream.
Netflix and the other streaming services are targeting a 25% traffic reduction in Europe and will respond to other regions appropriately if and when they receive the call to arms from local authorities.
That said, British Telecom has flexed its muscles, saying that – despite experiencing weekday daytime network traffic spiking by between 35% to 60% – it is “nowhere near” capacity and this figure is still about half of what it handles during peak times.