Royalty-Free Video Coding Standards in MPEG [Standards in a Nutshell]

On 7 March 2013, the Moving Picture Experts Group Licensing Association (MPEG LA) and Google announced that they have entered into an agreement granting Google a license to techniques, if the patents in MPEG LA might be essential to VP8. Under this agreement, hardware and software companies are free to use the VP8 technology when developing their own products. Considering that it is now common to find patent disputes in headline news, the patent issues related to video coding standards are no exception. In this article, we report on the recent developments in royalty-free codec standardization in MPEG, particularly Internet video coding (IVC), Web video coding (WVC), and video coding for browser, by reviewing the history of royalty-free standards in MPEG and the relationship between standards and patents.