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Comment by fonosip | Hacker News Reader

Googles's motivation is money. also control.

H.264 is not free. and youtube could be reclassified in 2016 to pay a further royalty increase than the maximum 10%. YouTube is the largest video service provider in the world.

On the other hand google owns WebM (spent 100M on it)

Also youtube is spending a pretty penny on flash "premium" codec support. Also not free, and could also potentially save money there pushing WebM.

it is really googles's only way to go

regarding Apple, a simple solution is to add webM support to IOS. they have some time to do it. will also save them money.

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Moving to WebM may not save money for Apple. They gain money everytime someone pays MPEG LA for H.264 as they are one of the licensors. If H.264 loses widespread adoption Apple loses its share of the fees too.

Apple is on both the list of licensors and the list of licensees. In other words, they own some of the patents in the pool, and they pay to use those patents in the pool that they do not own. In order for Apple to make a profit on patent licenses, they would have to either own a majority of patents in the pool (if all of the patents are of equal weight) or those patents that they do own would have to have greater weight than all of the patents that are owned by others.

It's hard to say whether Apple actually gains anything. For all we know, they might be happy to break even.

While I do not know the exact figures, there still is a good possibility for Apple to gain

They pay for H.264 license to distribute their decoder, but collect royalty for their patents from every other codec vendor, device maker and commercial video distributor in the world.

I keep hearing this, but never with any figures.

Presuming Apple contributes a couple of patents to the pool, it doesn't seem likely that any income from MPEG LA would have any significance for them. Especially since they have to pay as a distributor of H.264 decoders anyway.

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