HEVC Advance Weighing 'Adjustments' In Its High H.265 Royalty Fees, Patent Pool Says

The HEVC Advance patent pool for H.265 intellectual property licensing took the opportunity of announcing its first new member to disclose it's getting some industry pushback to its plan to charge high royalty fees on the licensing of H.265 content and devices. HEVC Advance is "actively soliciting input from market participants and considering adjustments to arrive at a royalty structure that enables continued and rapid adoption of HEVC and brings the associated benefits to stakeholders within the media and technology industries," the company said Wednesday. “We have received significant market feedback, particularly on content fees, and will adjust fees to support widespread use of HEVC,” CEO Pete Moller said in a statement. That HEVC Advance will charge a royalty on HEVC content and come to market with a high-priced, two-tier structure for royalty treatment in different parts of the world are but two of many stark differences that set it apart from the alternative HEVC patent pool run by MPEG LA when HEVC Advance announced its licensing regime in late July (see 1507220001). In contrast to HEVC Advance, MPEG LA charges only a 20-cents-per-unit hardware royalty across the board for the use of HEVC codecs with no delineation for the type of device, and allows a hardware supplier licensee its first 100,000 units royalty-free, said a summary of the HEVC license agreement posted this month at the MPEG LA website. MPEG LA also caps a supplier’s royalty obligation at $25 million a year, the summary said. As for HEVC Advance's new member, it's MediaTek, the prominent manufacturer of systems-on-a-chip semiconductors for mobile and home entertainment devices. “The addition of MediaTek will substantially enhance the value of the HEVC Advance patent pool for our customers and is a significant step in realizing our goal of bringing HEVC to the global market by providing an efficient and transparent means to acquire necessary and high quality patent rights, at scale, in a fair, reasonable and balanced manner,” said Moller. “We continue to make great strides in building a substantial portfolio of high-quality HEVC essential patents available for license as we march toward our official launch in the fourth quarter.”