Codecs and Software Patents - Part III - AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) and Antitrust Issues
In Part I we explained the purpose of this series and in Part II we showed that AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) faces ongoing if not growing pressure against its promises and assurances regarding patents on mathematics.
As a bit of an introduction, consider this 2019 abstract (a year after the Alliance for Open Media came into existence): "With the advent of the recently launched AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) bitstream specification, there is currently a need for converting legacy content encoded with the state-of-the-art High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard to the new format. However, transcoding is a complex task composed of a decoding and an encoding process in sequence, which requires long processing times and high energy consumption. This paper proposes the first HEVC-to-AV1 transcoding solution, which is based on the high correlation between block size decisions in HEVC and AV1. The solution allows the AV1 encoder to inherit Coding Unit (CU) depth information from the HEVC bitstream to constrain the AV1 re-encoding process. Experimental results show an average transcoding time reduction of 35.41% at the cost of a compression efficiency loss of 4.54%."
Years later "AOM's video licensing policy" got the wrath of antitrust officials, but this was eventually (tentatively at least) resolved as "European Commission, which acts as the competition enforcer for the 27-country bloc, had been investigating alleged anti-competitive behaviour related to the licence terms of AOM's new standard software for streaming called AV1 since last year."
It was not, however, completely off the hook: (conditionally or temporarily let go)
"The Commission decided to close the investigation for priority reasons. The closure is not a finding of compliance or non-compliance of the conduct in question with EU competition rules," a spokesperson for the EU executive said in an email."The Commission will continue to monitor competition-related issues regarding standard essential patents with a substantial impact in the EU market."
There is some basis for these concerns. It's also a problem for Europe.
Check which companies are behind it - the same companies that pushed DRM into Web standards. As The Verge put it, "AV1 could improve streaming, so why isn't everyone using it?"
There are reasons.
As we'll show in later parts, this already results in bans of some hardware sales in Europe. █
Image source: The new logo for the Alliance for Open Media introduced on March 28, 2018
