Petteri Pyyny
27 Nov 2002 1:39
After months of negotiations, public outcries and protests from media companies, MPEG LA finally released its licensing contract for MPEG-4 video (including Simple Profile and Advanced Simple Profile).
The licensing contract is pretty much the same what consortium proposed in July after modifications were made to the original proposal introduced in spring that caused Apple to delay release of its latest QuickTime player and angry protests from various other technology and media companies.
The license has set fees for software and hardware encoders and decoders and MPEG-4 Industry Forum hopes that now when the licenses are available, companies would start using the technology more widely. The general public has used the MPEG-4 for a long time now -- DivX is basically just an MPEG-4 encoder and nothing else (and XviD is an MPEG-4 encoder as well) -- but now we will probably start seeing more advanced commercial usage for the technology.
Source: News.com