Kieran Kunhya

Multimedia is what we call a patent minefield.

There is two places where you have the most patents.

It's everything related to 3G, 4G, 5G, RF and multimedia because it's very mathematical and you can get great gains and so on.

So Google and Meta and Netflix wanted something where it was royalty free.

There are people who say that they have patents outside, but they are fringe patents, right?

So it's mostly true that it's patent-free.

Can you educate me at the patents side?

So usually, so MPEG does a format, right?

And then there is, everyone comes around and say, well, I have all those patents for the format.

And they do usually a union called, was called MPEG LA, MPEG Licensing Association.

And you put all the, all your patents in, and then you ask everyone who's using this format to pay for it.

Uh, imagine I'm doing something where I'm going to, instead of doing blocks, which are square, I'm going to do rectangles, right?

Oh, so every idea.

Yes.

Somebody patents it.

The biggest issue is not the following, right?

Because at the time of H.264, the patents were, let's call it, like, sane.

But there was so much money in that that for HEVC, a lot...

there were a ton of things that were pushed inside the specification, which are not useful in 99.9% of the time, but just one could add a patent on it.

And so it became that for HEVC licensing, there was MPEG-LA plus another patent pool called HEVC Advance,