HEVC Advance Quietly Starts Letting Rival Patent Pool Members Also Join It

The HEVC Advance patent pool recently began to allow licensors in the rival MPEG LA H.265 pool to hold membership in both pools, HEVC Advance CEO Pete Moller said in an interview. “We do allow existing MPEG LA licensors to join our pool. We have a provision, a procedure, that allows somebody in that pool, if they want to join our pool, they can do so,” he said. “We’re just starting to make people aware of that. There are some conditions.” Licensors could hold dual membership, provided they meet an HEVC Advance-imposed “condition or two, so that we don’t have a situation where people are getting paid twice,” Moller said. HEVC Advance hasn’t gotten any takers, he said. “We’re just now making it known. We’re not going out of our way on it.” It's not a repudiation of the two-pool structure on H.265 licensing, he said. “A lot of people felt that the MPEG LA pool met their needs.” When HEVC Advance launched its initial rate structure in July, it met with industry pushback over high prices and the imposition of content royalties (see 1507220043), “It was a little bit of a setback that we had to retrench and go back and rethink it,” Moller said when asked to assess the pool’s first year as a startup. “In the last two or three months, we’ve regrouped, we pivoted, we’re listening better, and frankly I’m very pleased.” HEVC Advance soon will be 500 patents strong, up from 370 now, he said. There was “no doubt, a little bit of a headwind when we initially launched, but I think we’ve fully recovered,” he said. One common area of query has been HEVC Advance’s revised policy of licensing content for free to services that charge no fee to end users, he said. Though HEVC Advance now licenses content royalty-free to public broadcasters and over-the-air services, confusion over new TV Everywhere “complex business models” has raised unforeseen questions among prospective licensors that often require time-consuming answers, he said. Another area of confusion has been the issue of yearly royalty caps, Moller said. “We initially didn’t have a cap,” he said, “and the marketplace pretty loudly told us, ‘Look you need a cap, you can’t not have caps.’” Having launched formal licensing activities in mid-January, HEVC Advance hasn’t signed its first licensee, and doesn’t expect to before the end of Q2, Moller said. “It simply takes that long to get these documents done,” he said of the documentation process for patent users. Once signed, “they’re long-term agreements -- 10 years plus,” he said.