Five years ago this week… MPEG chair and co-founder Leonardo Chiariglione released two fiery blog posts warning that success of the Alliance for Open Media’s royalty-free codec model would be a disaster for the entire video industry. Arguing that it would destroy incentives for technology companies to innovate for the common good of the industry, Chiariglione accused ‘Non-Practicing Entities’ (NPEs) of dragging down the MPEG movement. NPEs had become increasingly aggressive in extracting value from their IP, which in turn had thwarted MPEG’s efforts to heal the fractured royalty scene that had retarded take up of the latest ISO MPEG HEVC/H.265 codec. Chiariglione concluded that AOM had been able to step in and occupy the resulting void. — Netflix is reducing prices…