Comment by __david__ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by __david__ | Hacker News Reader

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I was involved with digital cinema in the mid 2000s and attended standards meetings. Dolby was constantly trying to push their proprietary format for 5.1 audio into the standard but luckily everyone else at the table pushed back, correctly pointing out that just raw PCM 5.1 audio was perfectly adequate (and didn't require a bunch of licensing fees!). Dolby had to actually innovate (with Atmos) to get anyone to actually listen to them.

Though I'm quite disappointed with ATSC 3.0 which appears to have given in to them and used their proprietary audio codec which no one supports yet. I'm extremely skeptical that it provides a tangible benefit over more widely supported formats. Yay, regulatory capture.

For the pedantic record, "regulatory capture" typically refers to a situation where an entity responsible for regulating another entity is controlled or influenced by the body it is meant to regulate. Like if the SEC was influenced by Goldman Sachs, or something, or the FDA was influenced by the pharmaceutical companies it was meant to regulate.

Standards bodies are comprised of its member companies, who negotiate (oftentimes quite hard!) with one another over what IP ends up in the standards. They're non-governmental trade organizations (though I suppose with ISO it gets semi-governmental).

Disclosure: I work at Dolby but do not have anything to do with standards. I dabbled in standards bodies at a previous startup but am really not qualified to weigh in on any of this, besides the stray pedantry around language.

Well French dvb standard is requiring e-ac3, so not all standardizers got the memo... (And it's being used mostly in stereo)

Fwiw, Dolby does bring something compared to PCM, which is metadata to dynamically change dynamic range on the final device, allowing higher ranges with perfect home cinema and smaller range when in a noisy environment

I suppose one man's regulatory capture is balanced by another man's monopolistic behemoth pushing out a competitor that doesn't have an alternate revenue stream.

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