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There is already an open media format (edit: for object-based immersive audio), it's called SMPTE 2098. Granted it's basically the mutant stepchild of DTS and Dolby ATMOS, but it does exist.

The real problem isn't the hardware manufacturers but the content producers. Dolby engages in blatant anticompetitive behavior that basically requires hardware manufacturers to support their codecs and make it impossible to innovate on the actual media formats in a way that might compete. For example: paying for content to be released in atmos or giving away the tools to author it for free.

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If only it was the only thing... Did you know Dolby is actively fighting open source software like VLC behind the scenes ? Anyone having a Dolby license is pressured to stay away from VLC, even when it's a superior technical solution.

The reason is simple: VLC/OSS developers have been implementing Dolby technologies without paying a dime or using proprietary blobs. How dare they!

I'm familiar with several Dolby tools for processing ATMOS and Dolby Vision, none of which are free.

So it’s anticompetitive to give away tools for free or paying content owners to use it?

Would you say the same about a search engine company that gives its browser away for free and pays its competitor in mobile a reported $18 billion a year to be the default search engine for its platform?

I would much rather tie my horse to Dolby than a company that has the attention span of a toddler.

Google is anticompetive and Dolby is. Just like in Google v. Oracle there are no true good guys here, only outcomes that are better or worse for the general public that various corporate entities have aligned themselves to for some perceived short term benefit.

Open standards are good for the general public, as are allowing re-implementations of APIs. Taking a look at Google's anticompetive use of search combined with ads would be absolutely fantastic too, but I'm not going to gate other actions on it unless there's some semblance of a chance that the connections between the two actions are anything other than theoretical.

So it’s open source? What happens as soon as Google abandons it and stops supporting in Android? YouTube? Do you think Apple will ever support it?

This is a standard, not a piece of software. Nothing "happens" just like nothing "happened" to mp3 or jpeg when they stopped being actively changed.

MP3 was not "an open standard", it was a patented technology, owned by the Fraunhofer institute and lead to hilarious lawsuits against people putting MP3 capabilities in both hardware and software without even knowing they had to pay license fees, until Fraunhofer gave up and gave MP3 to the world. And not "way back when", this is a story that didn't have a happy ending until 2017. And then only because technology had passed it by with the industry having mostly moved on to newer, better codecs.

> until Fraunhofer gave up and gave MP3 to the world

I thought the patent ran out.

In the US, patents don't just "run out", the patent owner has to actively not bother tweaking something trivial, filing for a new patent on top of their own while it's still active, and then start arguing that even though the old patent runs out, folks who act on that are now in violation of the new patent.

Is there any relation to this situation and how there were attempts to enforce the _patent_ (not the standard) of JPEG[1] that ultimately mostly failed?

[1] http://www.pubpat.org/jpegsurrendered.htm

Standards are only as open as their implementations. The fact that google isn’t really involving anyone in this and first introduced it in a closed door hush hush event makes me extremely skeptical.

A standard created by one body requires adoption by others before it can be a standard unless the first party owns the market. Implementations don't have to be open..

It's an open standard, so better than open source per se since you're not reliant on any particular source tree.

And in those cases you've listed, you're left with strictly more options than if it's not an open standard.

You’re not left with an “option” of an audio standard that none of your customers hardware or browsers support.

If the open solution doesn't take off in favor of the proprietary solution, then you're in essentially the same end state as if there was no open solution in the first place.

Not after you’ve already encoded your audio to support it. From history we know that Google isn’t going to do the leg work it takes to make the standard ubiquitous.

Why would you only encode your media in a format that none of your customers have support for in the first place?

Additionally, being an open standard, you can probably rely on ffmpeg supporting it. This allows you to transcode into something that your proprietary encoder will support for ingest if it comes to that.

Yes because transcoding audio couldn’t possibly lead to lesser quality.

Neither of these (HDR10+/DV, open spatial audio/Atmos) are due to compression, so yeah, kind of. They're both metadata schemes on top of other, pluggable compression schemes. So yeah, I wouldn't expect a conversion to necessarily end up with a loss of quality.

This is also ignoring the first sentence: your whole supposition is based on a scenario where you as the content producer for some reason encoded in a format that your customers don't have, and don't have the masters for some reason. Which is basically absurd for anything that would need dynamic HDR or spatial audio.

The browsers will support this. Customer hardware from large venders will take more time or never happen if they are getting paid not to. But other hardware can take it's place.

You think Apple will support it or even Microsoft? The large hardware vendors not supporting it is really a big deal don’t you think?

They both support the AOM.

They both also "support" Khronos - doesn't mean anything.

Sometimes, yes. Selling something for below cost with the intent to drive your competitors out of business is called "dumping" and has been illegal since the 1800s.

Because selling a product below cost is fundamentally unsustainable, there is no logical reason to sell a product for less than cost besides doing so temporarily with the hopes of being able to later recoup the loss with higher, above cost prices. This is anticompetitive because an inferior product can win out if it is backed by bigger pockets that can afford to stay unprofitable longer than the company making the superior product.

This is basic economics, not really something that needs to be thought out and debated from scratch by HN over and over everytime it comes up, so it really would be helpful if everyone who is thinking about commenting on economic issues like this tries to at some point spend a couple hours reading an AP Microeconomics text. If a high school kid or college kid can do it in a semester, and intelligent adult can cover the high points in a weekend.

Like most calls to just understand econ 101, the real life applications are significantly more complex.

> Because selling a product below cost is fundamentally unsustainable, there is no logical reason to sell a product for less than cost besides doing so temporarily with the hopes of being able to later recoup the loss with higher, above cost prices.

There are plenty of other reasons. The one applicable here is "commoditize your complement". Zero cost to consumer codecs mean more eyeballs on youtube videos, which means more ad revenue for Google. That thought process doesn't lead to later ramping up consumer costs. And if it's truly an open standard, how are they going increase costs when anyone can simply release a free implementation?

Anyone can release a “free version” of a phone that runs Android. How successful of an effort will that be without proprietary Google Play Services?

Which wouldn't be an issue if play services was an open standard.

How much demand is there for phones that run Android without Google Play Services?

In the US - none. That’s the point, Google used open source and gave software away for free to crush competitors and then used its market dominance and slowly made more of Android closed.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...

>So it’s anticompetitive to give away tools for free or paying content owners to use it?

Absolutely. Go look at how carnegie won the steel market by starving his competition.

More recently, Microsoft and Internet Explorer.

And absolutely nothing came of it in the US. Microsoft was not forced to unbundle IE, no browser choice, nothing.

Now all platforms are bundled with browsers and plenty of other software.

I think that has more to do with who was running the DOJ in the 90s vs. the early 2000s.

> Now all platforms are bundled with browsers and plenty of other software.

This is an interesting question. You could take it as Microsoft's argument before the DOJ being correct, that browsers become an inextricable part of an OS. Whether or not they would have been had they not included it, it seems like we can say in hindsight, of course it would have. But surely Microsoft's decision to do so influenced the way the market went.

Does that also apply to every other service and software that is either given away for free to gain traction? Does it apply to money losing VC backed companies?

Impact and outcomes matter more than explicit behavior when you look at this, it isn't a binary "do x and get banned" kind of program.

Perhaps it should.

> So it’s anticompetitive to give away tools for free or paying content owners to use it?

If the intent is to drive others out of the market, it could be right?

So what is the intent of any company that gives away software or any startup that operates at loss funded by VC money?

Or if the same company gave its mobile operating system away for free to undercut a rival and then as soon as it became ubiquitous, started making much of it closed source and forcing companies to bundle its closed source software?

If you ask Peter Thiel, it’s certainly not to engage in competition for the ultimate benefit of consumers. Not that he somehow speaks for everyone in VC funded startups at all. I just don’t find many other voices willing to say “competition is for losers” out loud where regulators might hear, even if the structure of their investments looks like it needs to find a monopoly to me.

Yes and yes.

Although honestly, it's always a nuanced thing.

But typically the idea is to use money and undercutting to force out competition, then when the competition dies quality goes to crap.

So it would be like if a big tech company used its money from search to fund an audio standard and give away the software for free to undercut a rival…

Yes

Yes, loss-leading in general can be anti-competitive. And I'm not the only one who thinks so! It obviously depends on the scale, but having been in the space in the past I can tell you the "we are literally paid to use this" hurdle is next to impossible to clear.

https://www.aeaweb.org/research/loss-leading-bans-retail-com....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

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