Five years ago this week… A video patent war was imminent as the second HEVC license – HEVC Advance – was unveiled with a suicidal price tag, charging content owners as well as device makers and with no upper price cap. This deliberate act of sabotage came nine months after the MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG-LA) announced its own, reasonably priced patent pool, capped at $25 million a year. A second set of vendors who were furious to be left out of the MPEG-LA – companies like Dolby, General Electric, Mitsubishi – made this move in protest. If vendors began to flee the codec, out of fear of legal action from either patent pool, it seemed likely that Google and V-Nova’s…