He's a short version: AAPL and MSFT have a stake in MPEG-LA owner of the proprie...

		yanw on May 2, 2010 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Why Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Th... He's a short version: AAPL and MSFT have a stake in MPEG-LA owner of the proprietary H.264, for now they lets us use it without paying royalties, Mozilla and other smaller players can't support because it's proprietary. One day MPEG-LA will ask for it’s money and we’ll all be royally fucked, it happen before with GIF, so please support any existing or to introduced open source alternatives.

Decoders and encoders have to pay royalties today. There an additional royalty for "streaming" coming in 2016.