2013/8/29 Bill Farrow <[email protected]> > On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 6:21 PM, Philippe Verdy <[email protected]> > wrote: > > If New Zealand has already granted patents applicable in New Zealand, it > > cannot rule them out unilaterally, without compensating the patent holder > > > > But now there may be problems for media producers that sell products in > New > > Zealand : MPEG products will not be sellable there because they will > have to > > be reencoded specifically for New Zealand. But large online media > > MPEG LA will already have a patent thicket established in NZ. Once > those patents expire, an MPEG License will no longer be required to > encode or decode those formats. > > If or when the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) is ratified, > the NZ Government might be forced to overturn their ban on software > patents. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Strategic_Economic_Partnership > > Did you know that NZ has already made the transition to Digital TV > using DVB-T with H.264, leapfrogging over the older MPEG2 encoding > format. >
Yes I know, like most countries in the world except the poorest countries in Africa and Caribbeans. These are the same countries that also have difficulty to transition their GSM mobile networks to except in dense metropolitan areas. The same countries will prefer investing in G3 mobile networks directly, or sen their programs to the satellite instead of terrestrial broadcasts. I already indicated it when I spoke about the cost of the transition (for the media producers, for TC channel programmers, for broadcasting infrastructures, and for customers): they have already paid several transitions on the mobile network, and on the TV network, but this is still not completely finished everywhere and the transition with dual networks is extremeley costly for TV channels or on their own brodcast network. In France, the free-to-air DVB.T started with MPEG2, now we also have MPEG4 for all the same channels in HD since a couple of years, plus a few additional ones since the extinction of the analog terrestrial brodcast in all regions (the transition from the former analog TV is terminated almost everywhere except for extremely local areas with low power re-emitters, or in private distribution by cable for some grouped housings (using a transcoder for some channels), or still on historic cable networks. Even if they are also transporting numeric channels and triple-pay TV+Internet+phone, the cable operators still continue delivering the historic analog channels in SECAM (PAL for some local channels of some border regions) + DVB.T channels in MPEG2 + DVB.T HD channels in MPEG4 + additional DVB.C subscription channels in MPEG4; sometimes this means that some channels are delivered on 4 channels simultaneously on the cable ! In some areas the public regional network (France 3) is delivering the regional programs of 2 or 3 regions simultaneously on the same DVB.T broadcast, in MPEG2, on separate channels even if they are broadcasting the same program in some hours, and so these few regional channels, which were not converted to HD on DVB.T with MPEG2, are also in DVB.T HD with MPEG4 on cable networks among all the regional channels). On ADSL Internet networks, all these channels are available in SD and HD but they are not multiplexing the bandwidth but selected on demand. On mobile networks, they are available only in SD but encoded only with MPEG4 (in a proprietary encrypted format based on H.264 AVC with network-specific protocols requiring network-specific "boxes": these boxes use proprietary extensions of generic Linux firmwares, these extensions are definitely not open-sourced, you can rent this box or you can buy this box from a single provider, the ISP itself, but you cannot use generic modems except for the Intenet access only with online TVOD or VOIP services from third parties (whose usage is blocked at the protocol level on mobile Internet accesses, using slow HTTP(S)-only proxies over private NAT-ed IPv4 WANs but no full-IP connectivity) Not all channels are available on mobile networks. MPEG2 will still remain for some more years in parallel to MPEG4 in France, at least with DVB.T over the air or with DVB.T and DVB.C on cable. There's no space left for open/free codecs replacing the MPEG suite... But on the satellite there's only one standard : MPEG everywhere (preferably MPEG4 instead of MPEG2 because of enonomies on bandwidth, but also because of encryption for limiting the region of reception, even if there's no subscription, you have to buy a proprietary decoder card). The way the European satellites are multiplexing the channels in the same base channel also requires MPEG. Other open streaming envelope formats are not supported. So I really wonder how NZ customers will receive their programs on satellite if it requires an MPEG decoder. May be the MPEG LA will create a new version specific for use in New Zealand. I think that patent licences on MPEG wil be replaced by licences on closed softwares plus contractual requirements that customers must accept (without being able to choose the hardware, so that the broadcaster will remain the owner of the terminal equipments to rent with a subscription, so the open/free alternative will be even more reduced than what it is today in NZ). This could also mean the end of muliplay offersin NZ (with as many proprietary appliances or terminals to rent as there are program providers or non-interoperable access networks...), and an increased cost for customers.
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