Should online video encoding be free?
Michael Gay December 11th, 2007
A very interesting question is asked by Philippe Le Hegaret, the Architect Domain Leader at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3), in this video interview on blip.tv. He suggests that video encoding software should be free, just as software is available for free web authoring. The W3C advocates the availability of a royalty-free encoding technology so anyone can create video without having to pay. It’s an interesting idea, but you can bet companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, and others would like to keep encoding technology under a license model. From my experience, the cost to purchase improved video codecs is often a roadblock to upgrades. What do you think?
3 Comments Add your own
1. Gorman | December 11th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
All for the idea, but I don’t envy the people who will have to pry it out of those companies’ cold, dead hands.
2. Mike | December 11th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
Like Theora, the video equivilent of Ogg Vorbis.
Oh, you haven’t heard of Theora, the open-source, royalty-free, codec which has been around for years? EXACTLY! You thought I was talking another language. What he advocates has been around for years and nobody’s even heard of it. It’s not about corporate - it’s all about consumer adoption. That’s how mp3’s became the world-wide audio standard despite the fact that the format is licensed to Phillips Corporation and they draw royalties on licensing non-open-source mp3 software.
3. Anonymous | December 12th, 2007 at 6:55 am
Don’t forget, Microsoft’s encoding technologies are all free to anyone.
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