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Web Video Rivalry Sparks U.S. Probe (WSJ)Web Video Rivalry Sparks U.S. Probe (WSJ)Posted Mar 4, 2011 18:23 UTC (Fri) by wahern (subscriber, #37304)In reply to: Web Video Rivalry Sparks U.S. Probe (WSJ) by clugstj Parent article: Web Video Rivalry Sparks U.S. Probe (WSJ)
Is there something preventing Apple from *also* supporting WebM? (This is a serious question about their contracts with MPEG LA.) Because if there isn't, your point is invalid.
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Web Video Rivalry Sparks U.S. Probe (WSJ) Posted Mar 4, 2011 18:25 UTC (Fri) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link]
Apologies if the answer is in the article. I've been boycotting the WSJ for a couple of years now.
Web Video Rivalry Sparks U.S. Probe (WSJ) Posted Mar 7, 2011 0:45 UTC (Mon) by alsuren (subscriber, #62141) [Link]
Web Video Rivalry Sparks U.S. Probe (WSJ) Posted Mar 7, 2011 1:30 UTC (Mon) by alsuren (subscriber, #62141) [Link]
Okay, that was a bit harsh. Sorry about that. I know that you might not respect the journalistic integrity of wsj, but commenting on things without taking the time to become well-informed makes it harder for other people to also become well-informed.
Web Video Rivalry Sparks U.S. Probe (WSJ) Posted Mar 4, 2011 19:32 UTC (Fri) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]
Not really. If you pushed they'd claim that they didn't want to undertake any additional patent exposure, but consider that they ship an enormous number of things which potentially create exposure (including the prior On2 codecs) this would seem disingenuous.
Apple has always been unhelpful with third party open media formats. If you believe this to be a result of their astonishing NIHness or something more diabolical is more a question about you than a question about apple.
My favourite example is lossless compressed audio. Although flac was available for years and fairly widely adopted, Apple created ALAC— which provided somewhat worse compression with worse computational complexity (http://members.home.nl/w.speek/comparison.htm), yet was still using the same general class of techniques (and lossless audio isn't a particularly hot patent area). Since the quality of lossless is always perfect licensing, compatibility, compression, and cpu usage are really the only things worth worrying about.
So, rather than something open and widely adopted (with a BSD licensed reference implementation) they used something worse in every important way except the "Invented by and proprietary to apple" metric, and possibly by a lines of codec metric.
Web Video Rivalry Sparks U.S. Probe (WSJ) Posted Mar 4, 2011 20:07 UTC (Fri) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]
Why would they support WebM also? It's just more work for them and gets them in hot water w/ MPEG LA.
Web Video Rivalry Sparks U.S. Probe (WSJ) Posted Mar 4, 2011 20:12 UTC (Fri) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]
Once you are a member of the cartel, it's just much easier to stay a member.
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