The most widely used video format on the web will remain free in perpetuity

MPEG LA, the company that manages patenting and licensing for many Internet media standards has just announced that content using the H.264 video encoding standard is to remain royalty-free for the entire life of the licence. This is extremely important as it addresses fears that it could become subject to royalty payments from January 2016 after the current licence term expires. The announcement made it clear that royalty charges for internet video, which is free to end users (known as ‘Internet Broadcast AVC Video’), will not be charged beyond that time.

H.264 has become one of the dominant video standards on the internet, used by most content providers, including BBC iPlayer and BUFVC’s own BoB National service in addition to mobile phone devices, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players etc. Importantly this announcement may allow H.264 to become the standard video codec for the upcoming HTML5, the next major revision of the HTML standard. HTML5 incorporates the ability to play video content without the need for plugins such as Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. Currently the most likely candidate had been Ogg Theora which, while supported by Mozilla, Opera and Google, has not been picked up more widely.

Read the full news release by MPEG LA