alt.hn

4/3/2026 at 6:20:16 PM

Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M

 https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/streaming/h264-streaming-license-fees-jump-from-100000-to-4-5-million

by MaximilianEmel

4/3/2026 at 8:48:11 PM

Trying to milk the last drop before the patents expire? H.264 patents have already expired in most of the world and the remaining ones, which might not even be necessary for the vast majority of H.264 use, are also approaching expiry very soon:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

by userbinator

4/3/2026 at 11:30:26 PM

Milk the last drop, or raise the prices so high that people transition to a more reasonably priced option with a patent that isn’t expiring soon?

by notatoad

4/4/2026 at 10:06:50 AM

Seems unlikely, migrating away from an entrenched codec like H264 isn't like a routine software update. It has widespread hardware support, and there's an enormous body of H264 video out there.

As fhn points out, there are now truly open video codecs available (open specification, royalty free, unencumbered by patent terms) that are able to compete with the patent-encumbered ones on technical merit. Seems curious that the patent-holders would want to hike prices in this way and validate the motivation behind the truly open codecs.

Also, the article mentions the licensing fees for H265 were also increased recently. It doesn't seem to give a figure, a quick web search turns up 25% [0] or perhaps 20% [1]. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious but I'm not clear on how the change in price relates to the patent dispute between Nokia and certain laptop manufacturers.

(It seems the H264 fee increase affects streaming providers only, whereas the H265 fee increase did not, as it affected laptop manufacturers.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46004129

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46003285

by MaxBarraclough

4/4/2026 at 12:39:05 AM

you mean AV1?

by fhn

4/3/2026 at 9:43:36 PM

It's interesting because this isn't that exactly the same thing Fraunhofer did with the MP3 patent?

by donatj

4/4/2026 at 4:39:26 PM

>Trying to milk the last drop before the patents expire?

Old licenses are grandfathered in previous pricing. So this isn't about milking, but likely a tactic specifically aiming at certain companies. But I am wondering why they bother to do this at this stage of the game.

I am hoping we could further innovate on top of H.264 to have a better patent free video codec.

by ksec

4/3/2026 at 7:35:02 PM

That's an insane amount.

That makes me feel even more strongly about throwing proprietary and predatory codecs in the trash and opting to use AV1 et al wherever possible, it's better anyways and surely close to a decade after coming out, we'd expect devices to support it well enough.

by KronisLV

4/3/2026 at 7:58:05 PM

> it's better anyways and surely close to a decade after coming out, we'd expect devices to support it well enough.

A lot of people, myself included, are still using quite old hardware. The GPU in my daily driver is ~10 years old at this point. Between crypto, COVID, and this AI craze raising GPU costs by insane amounts, it hasn't made sense to replace it with something newer. I know I'm not alone on that...

by Figs

4/3/2026 at 8:24:56 PM

For legacy devices, VP8/VP9 is a good option. Intel Added VP8 hardware decoding to Broadwell which was 12 years ago. Nvidia had hardware VP9 decoding 10 years ago on the Geforce 10 series. AMD had hardware VP9 decode support 9 years ago on the Radeon 400 series.

by craftkiller

4/4/2026 at 11:50:50 AM

If my 10 year old card can't encode in hardware, it's a nonstarter.

by cwillu

4/4/2026 at 3:58:33 AM

I still happily use my 2012 27" iMac for all my work. So I'm with the parent comment.

by throwawaytea

4/4/2026 at 6:03:55 AM

I work in AI and I'm surrounded by RTX-4090 and H100 servers but for much of the day to day AI training I use my RTX-970 in the desktop on my desk for convenience and it works just fine for most cases.

Literally 2 meters from my desk is a 2x RTX-4090 server and many times I just use my 8 year old GPU anyway so you don't need it.

by jurschreuder

4/4/2026 at 10:59:58 AM

For a long time I thought my RTX-2060 was just not capable and the other day I did a ffmpeg GPU transcode and was surprised by how well it did. So now I am thinking about putting on some of Google's new Gemma edge models (probably the smallest will work with my 6GB VRAM + 2 GB) setup. I am not a 100% sure what that 2GB is but I think it is borrowing from the system in some manner.

by deskamess

4/4/2026 at 11:52:23 AM

Video encoding uses dedicated silicon, it's not using the card's compute.

by cwillu

4/3/2026 at 8:01:51 PM

Insane in absolute terms, but not per user. Take look at the actual fee schedule [1]. The most costly is the license for cable TV, which costs 50¢ per year per subscriber. The least costly is social media, which goes up to whopping 4.5¢ per MAU per user.

I very much understand how the licensing alliance likely was bothered by the fact that they are leaving money on the table, when TikTok's revenue per user is $50 a year, and a cable subscription is easily $800 per year, with the high-end reaching $2000. The big players aren't going to notice much. For the small players, nothing changed.

[1]: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/3wzYaofEETCfXdQmREx9BK-120...

by nine_k

4/3/2026 at 11:20:37 PM

I think the dumb part is that it's not like decoding or encoding video becomes harder when there's more users. The effort to write code for encoding for a small service of 1000 users and a large service of 10 million users is the exact same. We really don't need middlemen extracting everything they can, which will drive up costs.

by PokestarFan

4/3/2026 at 9:39:15 PM

Is it insane at all? The biggest fees are charged to the biggest providers. With short form video now the dominant form of addictive social media content, it doesn’t seem insane at all that large media companies ought to compensate inventors/owners of patented video technology. A company with 100 million or more subscribers is not a company I feel a lot of empathy for if they’re trying to avoid paying licensing fees.

by adriand

4/3/2026 at 9:59:41 PM

It goes to $2.5m for 5 million users/subscribers and tops out at $4.5m for 100 million subscribers. It’s not staggered evenly at all IMO. So I worry mainly for the small players. This shouldn’t have any meaningful effect on any big player.

by sheepscreek

4/4/2026 at 12:20:01 AM

But for small players nothing apparently changed, they keep paying the $100k as usual.

by nine_k

4/4/2026 at 7:31:01 AM

5 million users isn’t a lot unless we’re talking paid subscribers. Their license likely does not make a distinction. For a (free/ad supported) service like a niche YT clone, this could be fatal.

by sheepscreek

4/3/2026 at 8:26:56 PM

The problem is that open codecs can still be encumbered by patents and the holders will sue. VP9 and AV1 have their own patent pool for that very reason. Google may have open sourced its codecs but if they don’t indemnify users people who think they’re safe might be in for a bad time.

by Veliladon

4/5/2026 at 10:42:25 AM

100%. Just because AOM/Google says that wont charge a royalty doesn't mean AV1 isn't covered by patents owned by others. Since everyone and their brother saw how they can milk the patent system for money, they got patents that cover all "next-gen" video technologies (AV1, HEVC, VCC) a long time ago and will sue anyone that uses them. Ironically, since there are so many patent holders, each of which want a larger piece of the "licensing pie", it's making the new video technologies impossible to license. You may license HEVC or AV1 from one patent pool, but the other two and hundreds of other individual patent holders could also sue you. This is why many brands like Synology, Dell and HP have just started to simply remove these codecs from their products. I wouldn't treat any video codec as "patent free" until AT LEAST 20 years after the spec was release (AV1 = March 2038). This kind of infighting will guarantee that HEVC or AV1 will never become a ubiquitous standard for at least 20 years the way AVC/h.264 did.

I, for one, am happy about this. Nothing makes me happier than to see patent trolls eat themselves alive. Also, being an open source advocate, I appreciate when propriety technologies that are "good enough" can finally be used by open source applications. Unless you are pushing a ton of video, or working with high resolution (4K, 8K)/ high bit-rate videos, AVC/h.264 is perfectly fine.

by bytecode36

4/3/2026 at 11:35:18 PM

There's sadly loads of older Apple and Android devices out there holding back AV1 adoption for years to come. Hardware AV1 decoding only just arrived in the Apple M3+ and A17 Pro onwards, and software decoding has its own big trade offs regardless of the OS.

by jordand

4/5/2026 at 10:11:17 AM

The big problem is that Apple disables AV1 support in Safari on devices that do not have hardware decoders, even if those devices are powerful enough to decode in software. I can understand it for a phone, but it seems unreasonable for an M2 Ultra Mac Studio.

by dabinat

4/3/2026 at 8:22:25 PM

AV1 might not be as patent-free as we had hoped: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-fr...

by dmitrygr

4/5/2026 at 2:45:43 AM

It's more another example of 'you can sue for anything on a whim'.

by xiphmont

4/5/2026 at 9:32:40 AM

What's the likelihood Dolby succeeds?

by breve

4/3/2026 at 6:44:03 PM

Aren't VP9 and AV1 supposed to be "royalty free formats" ?

by hollow-moe

4/3/2026 at 7:21:15 PM

They are supposed to be, but Disney doesn't think so: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-fr...

Also, let's not forget that the majority of devices still don't have AV1 hardware decoding support. For example, Apple only recently (2023) added support with iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs.

by watermelon0

4/3/2026 at 8:04:02 PM

> For example, Apple only recently (2023) added support [for AV1].

Apple has been actively obstructing open video formats for a long long time—Apple is the reason there isn’t a baseline format for <video> in the HTML5 spec, for instance. (Or at least there wasn’t when the spec was still a well-defined document with a version number; I see no merit in keeping track of the “living” one.) Incidentally, Apple is a member of MPEG-LA and claims to hold numerous patents covering both AVC and HEVC.

At this point, whatever harms befall Apple’s users due to lack of Apple’s lack of format support are entirely Apple’s fault.

by mananaysiempre

4/3/2026 at 11:10:22 PM

Don't forget their lack of support for FLAC. It's completely mind-numbingly, brain-damagingly stupid.

by helterskelter

4/5/2026 at 12:26:29 PM

They support ALAC though, which is also known as "totally not FLAC".

by AlexeyBelov

4/3/2026 at 7:27:52 PM

The claims made by Dolby that some H.265 patent claims that are formulated very vaguely also apply to AV1 are probably bogus.

Like many other such frivolous patent lawsuits, Dolby hopes to either scare the other company into making a deal in order to avoid bigger legal expenses, or to establish a legal precedent if their cunning lawyers can convince a technically incompetent jury that the H.265 patents are applicable to AV1.

This is the kind of trial that should have never been decided by a normal jury, but only by a panel of neutral experts in this field.

by adrian_b

4/3/2026 at 7:55:08 PM

Is a panel of 'neutral' experts even possible to field in this area? I feel like anyone with sufficiently in depth knowledge of both the AV1 and HEVC specs has almost certainly derived a big paycheck for years from stakeholders on one side or the other of these lawsuits.

I'm no expert, but Google having designed AV1, I can certainly imagine a world where the codec infringes upon HEVC just enough that the lawsuit fees would come out in the wash.

by skrrtww

4/3/2026 at 8:28:28 PM

You are right about the danger of non-neutral experts, but there still is an essential difference between a group of experts and a jury.

The experts may be biased, but when they open the mouth and try to argue their position their bias becomes obvious for the other experts and it can be contradicted with logical arguments.

Unless all the experts work for an interested party, it would be very difficult to impose an incorrect verdict, because it is impossible to argue in its favor without the mistakes in the argument being immediately exposed by an interlocutor.

On the other hand, with a standard jury most people will be unable to see what is wrong in the arguments presented to them and they will not be able to distinguish truth from lies in such technical subjects.

The US elections and the elections in many other countries are an eloquent proof of the capacity of average people for distinguishing truth from lies concerning much simpler facts than the details of video compression patents. Expecting a jury to choose the right verdict in such a trial seems too optimistic.

by adrian_b

4/4/2026 at 6:22:40 AM

hmm if you know how patents work, "Google having designed AV1" isn't same as "Google 100% sure AV1 doesn't have patent infringes"

even if you're google, you can't be 100% sure if there's some obscure patent lurking around the corner

by sysguest

4/3/2026 at 8:25:15 PM

What I don't understand is why the AV1 pool isn't activating their MAD clause.

Part of the idea with AV1 was that with the constituents also holding such a massive warchest of patents (plus big tech being richer than god), they would countersue and demolish anyone that tries to bully AV1 users. Which would act like deterrence.

Where is all that might? Was it all just saber rattling, and are they basically going to let the AVC / HEVC patent holders make a fool out of them?

by jorvi

4/3/2026 at 8:37:37 PM

For now Dolby has just filed a lawsuit.

If this will reach a trial, it remains to be seen whether Snap will fight alone or it will receive support.

by adrian_b

4/3/2026 at 10:40:15 PM

>hardware decoding support.

As a side note this isn't always superior - recently discovered my desktop uses way more power with hardware decode than software. Counterintuitive but issue isn't per pixel efficiency but that it keeps the GPU in a higher power state

by Havoc

4/3/2026 at 7:21:14 PM

They have been created with the express purpose of avoiding incidents like this.

Instead of paying the ransom, a streaming company should transcode their movies to a royalty-free format, like AV1 or VP9.

Even big companies like Dell have preferred to disable the H.265 codecs in the computers they sell, instead of accepting similar demands for greatly increased royalties, and I think that it was the right choice.

by adrian_b

4/3/2026 at 7:04:41 PM

This seems particularly desperate, but I'm not surprised this is happening, given that patent owners in general have been very angry that H.264 didn't wind up being nearly as lucrative as MPEG-2 was. Hell, I remember the days when they couldn't even agree if H.264 should have a free streaming tier at all or not - and it seems like that went away.

Maybe Google should finally make good on their threat to only stream YouTube in royalty-free standards.

by kmeisthax

4/3/2026 at 9:41:13 PM

Communication formats should not be patentable. The potential for lock in abuse is too high.

by amelius

4/5/2026 at 3:22:15 PM

What is the alternative? It seems like a lot (a majority?) of professional formats are professionally developed by for-profit consortia, with open-source trailing behind as patents expire. Isn't this what patents are for? If a private entity drops $$$/time/expertise into tech shouldn't they be rewarded for some period?

The alternative would be lavishly funded public research, which sounds great to me! But is that going to happen?

by spopejoy

4/3/2026 at 8:41:34 PM

Profit-seeking at society's expense.

Also known as rent-seeking: "The act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, heightened debt levels, risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions, and potential national decline."[a]

Sigh.

---

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

by cs702

4/3/2026 at 7:08:33 PM

I guess to me this doesn't seem like that big of a deal? I mean if you have a 100 million subscribers, do you really care much about a few $million increase? I thought the big players like Youtube had already moved to open source codecs already anyway.

by falkensmaize

4/3/2026 at 7:21:29 PM

>few $million increase?

Existing licensees are grandfathered in to the old price.

by charcircuit

4/3/2026 at 7:13:31 PM

They should be sued. It's incredible discriminatory to make it so ridiculously hard for new players to complete.

Hopefully the Licensing Alliance never ever ever gets another customer ever again. Hopefully no one uses any of their new encodings. This is an untrustworthy company, that always have been out to fleece the industry and hold back humanity. Licensing Alliance embodies Lawful Evil, is a stain on the patent system as a whole. It's hard to find the words for how awful, how enraging this cabal is. Ugh. What an evil drain.

We should be able to use computers for audio and video, and it shouldnt involve kings ransoms to some jerks who are better at paperwork & lawyering.

All that work on av1 and av2 looking more and more civilization ally essential as times goes on.

by jauntywundrkind

4/3/2026 at 7:08:56 PM

I’m confused about this. If I have video on my website that is encoded in x264 am I obligated to pay fees?

by VladVladikoff

4/3/2026 at 7:10:31 PM

Not if you are in Europe or in any other place where the H.264 patents have expired.

The patents are still valid in USA, Brazil and a few other places.

by adrian_b

4/3/2026 at 7:18:42 PM

*Claimed to still be valid.

If you're just hosting videos on your website you are probably using High Profile which was standardized in March of 2005, i.e. more than 20 years ago. That doesn't stop VIA and MPEG-LA from claiming they still have relevant patents, but that claim is dubious and hasn't been tested in court.

by silotis

4/3/2026 at 8:47:06 PM

Note that there's some patents that haven't yet expired, at least in the US. AFAIK this is because if there's delays in patent examination you get extra duration on your patent to compensate. Here's a list of the patents that were filed before High Profile was standardized and are still valid: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

Of course MPEG-LA deliberately makes figuring out which patents cover which parts of H.264 (which is really a set of multiple standards spanning a 10+ year period) ambiguous and hard to determine in order to sell more licenses.

by ndiddy

4/3/2026 at 9:13:56 PM

> *Claimed to still be valid.

I can't afford to claim otherwise.

by themafia

4/4/2026 at 12:21:23 AM

How are these software patents still valid after Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International precedent? Or is this a case where companies just pay the fee because it's cheaper than fighting it in court?

by panny

4/3/2026 at 8:47:15 PM

Only if it is used commercially. If it is a free video you do not have to pay fees.

by charcircuit

4/3/2026 at 6:42:50 PM

what are the open source alternatives?

by NooneAtAll3

4/3/2026 at 7:04:00 PM

In most countries, including in Europe, the H.264 patents have already expired. There you can use H.264 freely.

Some patents remain valid in USA, Brazil and a few other countries.

by adrian_b

4/3/2026 at 6:45:19 PM

This is for patent licensing. Using an open source implementation doesn't get rid of your obligation to license the patents for it.

by charcircuit

4/3/2026 at 6:58:12 PM

In most countries the H.264 patents have already expired, for instance in Europe they have expired, but in USA not yet (in USA most patents should expire towards the end of next year).

So that firm might try to squeeze every penny they can before the expiration of the patents.

by adrian_b

4/5/2026 at 10:47:11 AM

Just because AOM/Google says that wont charge a royalty doesn't mean AV1 isn't covered by patents owned by others. Since everyone and their brother saw how they can milk the patent system for money, they got patents that cover all "next-gen" video technologies (AV1, HEVC, VCC) a long time ago and will sue anyone that uses them. Ironically, since there are so many patent holders, each of which want a larger piece of the "licensing pie", it's making the new video technologies impossible to license. You may license HEVC or AV1 from one patent pool, but the other two and hundreds of other individual patent holders could also sue you. This is why many brands like Synology, Dell and HP have just started to simply remove these codecs from their products. I wouldn't treat any video codec as "patent free" until AT LEAST 20 years after the spec was release (AV1 = March 2038). This kind of infighting will guarantee that HEVC or AV1 will never become a ubiquitous standard for at least 20 years the way AVC/h.264 did.

I, for one, am happy about this. Nothing makes me happier than to see patent trolls eat themselves alive. Also, being an open source advocate, I appreciate when propriety technologies that are "good enough" can finally be used by open source applications with broad support. Unless you are pushing a ton of video, or working with high resolution (4K, 8K)/ high bit-rate videos, AVC/h.264 is perfectly fine.

by bytecode36

4/3/2026 at 6:58:57 PM

AV1, as well as the older On2 codec series it was based off of (VP9, VP8, etc).

by kmeisthax

4/3/2026 at 6:59:11 PM

VP9, AV1

by topranks

4/3/2026 at 7:06:09 PM

As the article says, there are companies seeking royalties for both of these codecs.

by chromacity

4/3/2026 at 7:40:08 PM

The funny thing about patent licensing alliances is that there's no guarantee that nobody else outside of the bloc will pop up and start suing people.

Basically, you can consider AOM to be a licensing alliances, where the fee is zero.

by mook

4/3/2026 at 7:15:28 PM

There is no proof that their patent claims over AV1 or VP9 are valid.

For now they try to bully some smaller companies with the threat of the big legal expenses that would be needed to fight these claims.

by adrian_b

4/3/2026 at 7:30:43 PM

i don't think Snap Inc. and Amazon are small companies

by throawayonthe

4/3/2026 at 9:05:41 PM

Seeking is not getting, not even close. Suggesting it is only supports their propaganda and adds momentum to their bogus race to a cash grab.

by asadotzler

4/4/2026 at 12:16:21 AM

OpenH264, and Cisco already paid the fees for you, I guess.

by cocodill

4/3/2026 at 6:48:55 PM

That's just trying to promote a competitor. This is more or less what Fraunhofer did with the mp3 license, which resulted in bunch of new, and better formats.

by mrweasel

4/3/2026 at 7:31:29 PM

So should I re-encode all my videos to OGG? I’m really confused what this means for the average person who has home videos encoded in these formats.

by Noaidi

4/3/2026 at 7:41:47 PM

Note that OGG is not a video codec, it's just a container format. I.e. an OGG file can contain MPEG-4/H.264-encoded video.

by nuxi

4/3/2026 at 7:37:27 PM

Unless you're running a platform with millions of users, where you use the codec to encode/decode video for others, you have absolutely nothing to worry about due to these news.

by embedding-shape

4/3/2026 at 7:40:58 PM

Thank you!

by Noaidi

4/3/2026 at 7:17:22 PM

My advice (not a lawyer) is to ignore the licensing fees; the patents will all be dead by 2027 anyway.

Also I'm not responsible for whatever happens if you do this.

by ronsor

4/3/2026 at 11:03:36 PM

[dead]

by Steinmark

4/3/2026 at 10:14:02 PM

[dead]

by NetOpWibby

4/3/2026 at 9:26:35 PM

[flagged]

by jbverschoor