Re: [rtcweb] H.264 patent licensing options

[John Leslie <[e-mail]>]

Roman Shpount <[e-mail]> wrote:
>...
> In case of H.264, as far as our company is concerned, this implies that we
> cannot license H.264 IPR. To work around this, we are planning to offer
> H.264 in client software on the platforms where H.264 is provided by the
> platform itself or via OpenH264. In both cases, we consider H.264 licensing
> will be something that will occur between the end user and the platform
> provider, or, in case of OpenH264, between the end user and Cisco. If end
> users decides to ignore the H.264 licensing terms, as they typically do,
> this is between the end user and whoever provided them with the H.264
> license. We will not license H.264 ourselves or provide any H.264 licenses
> from us to our customers. In anything that we license directly to our
> customers or operate ourselves (which typically means professional
> conferencing services), we are planning to support VP8 only and will not
> claim WebRTC compliance. End points which implement H.264 only will not be
> fully supported by the services we operate and would only be provided with
> limited feature set that can be enabled based on peer-to-peer
> communications or relay without the need for transcoding or
> other H.264 related server functionality. This is why the currently offered
> compromise works for us even though H.264 licensing policy is less then
> ideal.
> _____________
> Roman Shpount

   This explanation is definitely helpful. Thank you!

--
John Leslie <[e-mail]>