Heads Roll in a Time of Transition for the Online Video Industry

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.的开头是这样的 《双城记, Charles Dickens’s serialized look into a very human inflection point in 18th-century London and Paris.

Dickens could have easily been describing a similar inflection point today, a future clouded with uncertainty: the shift in media delivery, 消费, 和所有权. We’ve seen a rapid uptake in cord cutting, a modern-day severing of ties to the coaxial cables—and media companies that own such infrastructure— that once linked us inextricably to media 消费 in the home.

As our modern-day guillotining of cable services continues unabated, we’ve seen the aftermath of a very uncertain future: Alliances shift as content owners seek substitute delivery approaches, with premium content following deals pitched by OTT or mobile device manufacturers—and even a few innovative content delivery services providers—as alternative ways to deliver views to an increasingly disjointed set of eyeballs.

If content is king, as we are fond of saying in the pages of 流媒体, then perhaps the queen in the mix is the chosen delivery approach at a particular time.

就像狄更斯的故事一样, 虽然, being queen might not be the best position in an uncertain future when it comes to balancing the cost of infrastructure to monetize content for premium content owners. Does one really want to invest in infrastructure when thousands of cord-cutting knives (and maybe a few knitting needles) are intent on separating the medium from the messages?

Another similarity—one that caused rebellion even in “safe havens,” such as Dickens’ England and the outlying colonies as well as France—was the question of unfair taxation.

In the streaming industry, when this type of potential taxation—in the form of licensing H.264 streaming playback—reared its head a decade ago, it was promptly and almost universally decried as a millstone around the neck of the industry’s attempt to soar. 许可条款被推迟, 然后又延迟了, allowing the very cord cutting we’re now celebrating as an industry.

一个由H.265 (HEVC) patent owners threaten again to slow growth at a point when we need to move quickly and decisively to offer long-lasting alternatives to traditional cable television media delivery.

The uncertainty has helped some companies, including one that I’ve been working with in a strategic advisory role, cash in on the confusion by offering ways to prolong the life of H.264编码. But the specter of undue HEVC licensing terms might be enough to shift the focus of the whole industry away from innovation and toward substitute approaches such as alternative codecs and delivery protocols.

There’s valid interest in the substitutes, 或者甚至“打破编解码器”,IBC的一个主题演讲是这样描述的, 由这些新的, 看似繁重的许可要求.

在狄更斯的故事中, 他被带到圣断头台, the substitute hero sums up his resistance to conformance with a now-famous line: “It is a far, 比我做的好得多, 比我做过的都要多.” His propitiatory act, while being led to his chosen fate, meant an innocent man could go free.

在现代社会, it may be the role of one of these alternative codecs to stand in for the standards-based codecs, acting as a stop-gap as the standards-based codecs flee the shackles of costly licensing requirements. That may sound cynical, but it’s worth consideration.

If the patent owners were to relent on licensing terms for another 5 years—following the lead of H.264个实践中的专利被许可人, if not in spirit—these same patent owners may find themselves reaping a much better reward in 2020 rather than contributing to industry bloodshed in 2015.

This article appears in the October 2015 issue of 流媒体杂志 授权我们的未来.”