Comment by bayindirh
3 months ago
While an individual license is 25¢ [0], $25MM is a somewhat sizeable amount of money for any company.
However, I'd personally accept to be able to buy my own license and enable the hardware a-la Raspberry Pi fashion.
Moreover, this is done on more expensive, business notebooks as well, which are both more expensive and used by the people who knows about this stuff.
The executives who made these decisions are not the most informed or the most brilliant, I assume.
[0]: https://via-la.com/licensing-programs/hevc-vvc/#license-fees
> While an individual license is 25¢ [0], $25MM is a somewhat sizeable amount of money for any company.
Not for HP or Dell. Maybe I've been working in BigTech for too long, but I can't even count that low anymore. $25M is a rounding error for most major product lines I've worked on in the past decade. But, then again, every hardware producing team I've worked on had this exact penny-pinching attitude on BOM cost. They'd throw away $25M opex like it's nothing, but spend $0.25 extra on the BOM?? Never!!!
I mean if the laptop cost $300 (feels like a very conservative estimate) providing HEVC would cost them. Lets see here... 1% would be $3, 0.33% would be $1, and the price per consumer of including the functionality would be a quarter of that, 0.0825% of the cost -- roughly a tenth of a percent.
What is the value (to the company) of the consumer saving 25c on the purchase price and then having such a godawful experience with the product that they say "I would never buy this again, nor ever tell anyone else to buy it"
The company very much doesn't want the customer to know that it spent $20 of the customer's money in wasted productivity to save itself 25 cents