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Comment by danbmil99 | Hacker News Reader

For the record. Yes, a lot of money was spent developing this codec. However, a lot of creativity and risk-taking was involved as well.

It was far from clear 15 years ago when xiph released Theora (aka vp3, ancestor of av1) that going up against mighty MPEG, with their enormous war chest from a decade of royalties, and dozens of patents (and the money to defend them) that success in the end was even possible much less assured.

It's really a wonderful story of the triumph of open source philosophy over the IP licensing model.

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While none of this is false, it's a bit of a misdirection to imply that the 'mighty MPEG' was a monolithic actor preventing this course of action from taking place. In fact, the individual collaborators that MPEG (or ITU) brought to the table were the same sorts of hardware companies, software companies, universities, research institutes, and media companies that are surprisingly familiar among AV1's contributors, and MPEG's licensing scheme -- the patent pool being its primary innovation -- was a way to seek mutually assured use of each other's work.

The story here isn't that the Big Evil companies behind the MPEG codecs were beaten by the Good companies behind the Alliance for Open Media -- the story is that the pool of companies is kinda-sorta the same or comparable, with plenty of them playing both sides, a fact not lost on the founder of MPEG [1][2].

[1] http://blog.chiariglione.org/2018/01/28/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16261313

> it's a bit of a misdirection to imply that the 'mighty MPEG' was a monolithic actor preventing this course of action from taking place. In fact, the individual collaborators

True but if we are comparing models for getting stuff invented collaboratively (open source vs. licensed IP) then this hardly misdirection. Indeed the fact that the same sort of actors found it possible/useful/necessary to go down the open route makes TD-Linux's point all the more interesting.

This is important because when policymakers talk among themselves they often just assume that IP and such are necessary for fostering innovation.

> This is important because when policymakers talk among themselves they often just assume that IP and such are necessary for fostering innovation

Would AV1 have been possible in 1993 when MPEG-1 came out? How would you have bankrolled the standard at the time?

> Would AV1 have been possible in 1993 when MPEG-1 came out?

No. There weren't enough transistors in the world. I'm not being silly. Something like Av1 happens now because Moore/Dennard allow it to.

It seemed to me like they meant the question politically, not technically, as in, would AOMedia have been possible?

I think it's widely understood that the technical innovations in sixth-generation codecs like AV1 were simply not computationally feasible on circa ~1993 devices, so I highly doubt that's what was meant. Therefore I'm not sure how transistor density relates to funding models for DSP innovation.

The answers aren't entirely separable. Hardware capable of any kind of video wasn't accessible to the larger community and it sure as hell wasn't affordable.

When Xiph.Org started (1994), even audio required high-end hardware. Yes, sound cards were available for PCs, but big enough hard disks were not.

When only the elites have access, the standards are made by elites.

Getting something like AOM would have been easy back in 1993 because the costs would have been much lower. Back then complexity had to be really low, which means most of the complicated modern tools were off the table. Coming up with something equivalent to MPEG-1 would have required just a handful of engineers over maybe a year. In terms of IPR, there would also have been much less to check than today. OTOH, the minefield was moving really fast at the time, which could have added some complications. In the end, I think the main reason nobody bothered with something AOM-like is that few people realized the huge problem of patents on standards.

~1993 is around when CompuServe and Unisys began negotiating about the implications of patented LZW in GIF files, but the issue didn't become public until 1994, but the community rebounded spectacularly by developing PNG in 1995.

So perhaps the cutoff year of 1993 is right before the threat of non-pooled patents was well-publicized.

There was a lot of video codec innovation back then too, but everything aside from the MPEG or ITU-T codecs was proprietary, and everyone took out patents. To Monty's point, the sheer number of endpoints capable of consuming digital video whose consumption somehow results in income for the publishers was just not quite there, making an alternate push for deriving revenue from DSP IP than patent licensing fees much less likely.

Money is necessary. IP rights are a general and flexible tool to funnel money into research.

AV1 is basically funded by Google as a quasi-charitable endeavor, as far as I can tell. Whilst there may be several apparent funders like Mozilla, they in turn trace their funding to Google.

"Research funding by Google" is never going to be a tactic that policymakers take seriously, and rightly so, even if it happens to be doing a lot of good work in this particular time period.

>AV1 is basically funded by Google as a quasi-charitable endeavor

Nothing charitable about it. They want to make money. So do a bunch of other companies. And they've realized the way to win that game is to relinquish control over the fundamental/infrastructural pieces.

That also has some beneficial aspects beyond 'a rising tide lifts all boats', but I feel more comfortable appealing to reliable motivations. The benefits to others aren't an accident, and they're important to e.g. us at Xiph, but let's not ascribe industry interest to anything more charitable than 'enlightened self-interest'.

MPEG is, for purposes of this discussion, a system that member companies have learned how to game. It is so thoroughly gamed that it has become dysfunctional and an impediment to progress. The open/RF development strategy is now consistently beating it despite MPEG having a consistent royalty revenue stream and a massive patent war chest. At this point, MPEG, as a self-interested system, is only trying to slow things down and keep control.

No, it's not monolithic inside, but the worst actors have solid control and it warps the behavior of the entire organization.

We saw that coming a long, long time ago and yet barely in time.

> It's really a wonderful story of the triumph of open source philosophy over the IP licensing model

It’s not an “open source philosophy over the IP licensing model.” It’s bankrolling a codec with content, device, and middleman revenues rather than content player revenues. The $_ dollars that Sony or Panasonic got for every DVD player through patent licensing has simply been replaced by the $_ that Google gets for every ad impression on YouTube or sale in the Google Play Store. It’s not a philosophical shift, merely a business model shift enabled by Internet video distribution.

But, there's an important distinction. In this case, Google did in fact support an open technology platform, so anyone can get their hands on it and distribute content, free of royalty and legal obligations.

They could have chosen to be much more focused on narrow self-interest, kept the technology proprietary, and played games with their competitors. I honestly believe they chose the high road because that's part of their culture.

You've got it backwards. AV1 is pushed by companies that profit from people who "distribute content." Apple and Google take a cut of sales on iTunes and Google Play, Google gets revenue from ads on Youtube, Netflix gets monthly fees, etc. The MPEG folks never tried to get money from people distributing content--the patents address, and the licenses are for, people who distribute encoders and decoders.

And I don’t agree with your point about the “high road.” Google releases lots of open R&D “for free” that’s bankrolled by its enormous advertising profits. I think you have to view their R&D efforts through that lens, because none of it would be possible without the monetization models enabled by the advertising business. Is Android, for example, a “high road” compared to Symbian, just because Android is free and open? Not in my view.

(Incidentally, it’s a lot like Xerox. Xerox PARC invented a ton of stuff that it didn’t patent and people freely used. But it was all bankrolled by their patents on copiers. When Xerox was forced to license those patents to Japanese companies, the money printing press disappeared and so did PARC.)

Your analysis accurate as far as it goes but you are kind of missing the point.

Granted, companies like Google and Xerox don't do things out of an altruistic desire to save the world. It's enlightened self-interest, and they do develop business models to make money.

The difference between their model and the more typical patent protection / royalty approach is that in the open case, anyone else can use the research to do whatever they want. Rather than being siloed within a single company, and protected through legal means, the research is free for anyone else to leverage. This results in best of class open solutions rising to the top, and avoids the problem of everyone reinventing the wheel in their own little wheelhouse.

I care less about how much money Google is making, & more about how much access I have to the research they are sponsoring.

> It's really a wonderful story of the triumph of open source philosophy over the IP licensing model.

3-5 years will tell whether it's a triumph or a tragedy. It's certainly not possible to know today. Fans were quite sure Beta meant the end of VHS, but there are so many other (more important, in many cases) factors than the technology.

Betamax wasn't an open standard for digital formats, so that comparison is disingenuous.

The fact that AV1 is explicitly not patent-encumbered is a very important feature.

Thanks for helping make that release happen.

Thanks to you, Monty, & all the other countless people who put in the hours, often without compensation.

It really is an interesting story, maybe someone will write about it some day.

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