Alumnus advocates for royalty-free codec

The popularity of online video is staggering and it shows no signs of slowing down. On YouTube alone, almost 5 billion videos are watched every day.

While most people are generally familiar with watching videos on their computers, mobile phones or DVD players, what’s happening behind the scenes to make those videos possible is a less-known domain.

Behind the scenes, video codecs are the tools that decode the video and audio stream of a video file in order to play it back on the appropriate device.

When first developed, all video codecs were royalty-free, but in 1995, the U.S. Department of Justice allowed codecs to be monetized by those with relevant patents.

Now, more than 20 years later, many of those patents have expired, once again putting the question of whether or not to monetize video codecs back into the spotlight.

Alumnus Jim Bankoski ’91 is advocating for the adoption of an open source, royalty-free codec.

So, why is it important to keep video codecs open source and royalty-free?

In a paper published by the Cambridge University Press, Bankoski and his colleagues Adrian Grange and Matthew Frost explained that “[t]he availability of a state-of-the-art, royalty-free codec levels the playing field, allowing small content owners and application developers to compete with the larger companies that operate in this space. This will ultimately result in a richer and more diverse internet.”

Royalty-free codecs not only allow for a variety of content creators, they also are practical given the fast-evolving needs of the internet.

“One of the major disadvantages of developing a codec through royalty-bearing standards bodies is that while it produces good codecs, the time required to do so is excessively long. The pace that codecs are evolving is insufficient to meet the expected rate of growth of video content in the coming years,” the paper said.

Bankoski said that video codecs with royalties “worked well at the beginning to help produce DVDs and other innovations.” But now, major companies like Google, Netflix and Microsoft have come together as part of the Alliance for Open Media to advocate for the royalty-free models.

Companies like Microsoft and Google have both produced their own royalty-free codecs, VC-1 and VP8/VP9, respectively. However, the existence of patent pools combined with the need for wide-scale adoption of any codec put forward means that the whole industry needs to agree to use royalty-free codecs to make them practical.

Nevertheless, the Alliance for Open Media has created and released its own royalty-free video codec.

Bankoski’s paper advocating for such a codec recently got the attention of the Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA). In recognition, APSIPA named Bankoski an Industrial Distinguished Leader for fall 2017. The APSIPA Industrial Distinguished Leader is a distinction reserved for those whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the fields related to APSIPA scope are deemed fitting of this prestigious recognition.

The discussion around royalty-free video codecs is far from over. As the saying goes: “watch this space.” There are sure to be changes and advancements as the public’s love for video content continues to grow.

Update: The Computer Science Department wants to extend its sincerest thanks to Jim Bankoski for his generous donation of over $30,000. In particular, $29,000 of his donation went directly to the department in support of recruiting and retaining female and under-represented minority students. Give to the Computer Science Department here.