Comment by rayiner
9 years ago
> This is important because when policymakers talk among themselves they often just assume that IP and such are necessary for fostering innovation
Would AV1 have been possible in 1993 when MPEG-1 came out? How would you have bankrolled the standard at the time?
> Would AV1 have been possible in 1993 when MPEG-1 came out?
No. There weren't enough transistors in the world. I'm not being silly. Something like Av1 happens now because Moore/Dennard allow it to.
It seemed to me like they meant the question politically, not technically, as in, would AOMedia have been possible?
I think it's widely understood that the technical innovations in sixth-generation codecs like AV1 were simply not computationally feasible on circa ~1993 devices, so I highly doubt that's what was meant. Therefore I'm not sure how transistor density relates to funding models for DSP innovation.
The answers aren't entirely separable. Hardware capable of any kind of video wasn't accessible to the larger community and it sure as hell wasn't affordable.
When Xiph.Org started (1994), even audio required high-end hardware. Yes, sound cards were available for PCs, but big enough hard disks were not.
When only the elites have access, the standards are made by elites.
Getting something like AOM would have been easy back in 1993 because the costs would have been much lower. Back then complexity had to be really low, which means most of the complicated modern tools were off the table. Coming up with something equivalent to MPEG-1 would have required just a handful of engineers over maybe a year. In terms of IPR, there would also have been much less to check than today. OTOH, the minefield was moving really fast at the time, which could have added some complications. In the end, I think the main reason nobody bothered with something AOM-like is that few people realized the huge problem of patents on standards.
~1993 is around when CompuServe and Unisys began negotiating about the implications of patented LZW in GIF files, but the issue didn't become public until 1994, but the community rebounded spectacularly by developing PNG in 1995.
So perhaps the cutoff year of 1993 is right before the threat of non-pooled patents was well-publicized.
There was a lot of video codec innovation back then too, but everything aside from the MPEG or ITU-T codecs was proprietary, and everyone took out patents. To Monty's point, the sheer number of endpoints capable of consuming digital video whose consumption somehow results in income for the publishers was just not quite there, making an alternate push for deriving revenue from DSP IP than patent licensing fees much less likely.