Company type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | Licensing administration |
Founded | 2023 |
Headquarters | , US |
Key people | Heath Hoglund |
Products | Patent licenses |
Website | www |
Via-LA is an American company based in San Francisco, California that licenses patent pools covering essential patents.
Via Licensing Corp acquired MPEG-LA in April 2023 and formed a new patent pool administration company called Via Licensing Alliance. [1]
In April 2023, in what is thought to be the first time that two pool administrators have merged into one, Via Licensing Corp acquired MPEG-LA and formed a new patent pool administrator called Via Licensing Alliance. Via President Heath Hoglund will serve as president of the new company. MPEG-LA CEO Larry Horn will serve as a Via-LA advisor. [2]
See also: Access Advance
This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.
The following organizations hold one or more patents in the Via-LA H.265/HEVC patent pool, this list does not include patents that have been removed from the patent pool nor does it include patents from other patent pools such as Access Advance.
Organization | Active patents | Expired patents | Total patents |
---|---|---|---|
GENSQUARE LLC | 1469 | 30 | 1499 |
Canon Inc. | 1011 | 59 | 1070 |
M&K Holdings | 1055 | 1 | 1056 |
KT Corp | 595 | 0 | 595 |
Tagivan II | 311 | 48 | 359 |
Fujitsu | 148 | 1 | 149 |
Apple | 72 | 53 | 125 |
IdeaHub Inc. | 120 | 0 | 120 |
Maxell | 64 | 10 | 74 |
Orange S.A. | 58 | 5 | 63 |
IBEX PT Holdings | 62 | 0 | 62 |
Vidyo | 43 | 0 | 43 |
HUMAX Holdings | 34 | 0 | 34 |
Siemens | 10 | 19 | 29 |
Industry-Academy Cooperation Foundation of Sejong University | 27 | 2 | 29 |
B1 Institute of Image Technology, INC | 26 | 0 | 26 |
British Broadcasting Corporation | 22 | 0 | 22 |
Funai Electric Co., Ltd | 17 | 0 | 17 |
The Trustees of Columbia University in New York City | 0 | 16 | 16 |
Hangzhou Boyun Technology Co., Ltd | 12 | 0 | 12 |
Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology | 11 | 0 | 11 |
SungKyunKwan University Research & Business Foundation | 11 | 0 | 11 |
Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK) | 7 | 0 | 7 |
Beijing Xiaomi Mobile Software Co., Ltd | 0 | 6 | 6 |
SK Planet | 5 | 0 | 5 |
Sky Media Tech, Inc. | 4 | 0 | 4 |
Reef LLC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
Digital Insights Inc. | 2 | 0 | 2 |
Korea Electronics Technology Institute | 1 | 0 | 1 |
Alpha Digitech | 1 | 0 | 1 |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | 1 | 0 | 1 |
ARRIS Enterprises, LLC, a CommScope Company | 1 | 0 | 1 |
Newracom Inc. (Newratek) | 0 | 1 | 1 |
Total (All Manufacturers) | 5203 | 251 | 5454 |
This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.
The following organizations hold one or more patents in Via-LA's H.264/AVC patent pool.
Organization | Active patents | Expired patents | Total patents |
---|---|---|---|
Dolby Laboratories | 823 | 798 | 1617 |
Panasonic Corporation | 283 | 1315 | 1598 |
Godo Kaisha IP Bridge | 44 | 1254 | 1298 |
LG Electronics | 67 | 933 | 1000 |
Toshiba | 7 | 388 | 395 |
Fraunhofer Society | 167 | 91 | 258 |
Microsoft | 13 | 228 | 241 |
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (including NTT Docomo) | 10 | 228 | 238 |
Sony | 3 | 152 | 155 |
3 | 137 | 140 | |
GE Video Compression | 0 | 136 | 136 |
Fujitsu | 0 | 106 | 106 |
Mitsubishi Electric | 3 | 97 | 100 |
Tagivan II LLC | 7 | 75 | 82 |
B1 Institute of Image Technology | 68 | 0 | 68 |
Samsung Electronics | 2 | 61 | 63 |
Maxell | 21 | 35 | 56 |
Siemens | 11 | 40 | 51 |
Koninklijke Philips N.V | 3 | 44 | 47 |
Vidyo | 41 | 2 | 43 |
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) of Korea | 7 | 28 | 35 |
Ericsson | 1 | 34 | 35 |
The Trustees of Columbia University in New York City | 0 | 26 | 26 |
Robert Bosch GmbH | 1 | 22 | 23 |
Polycom | 1 | 20 | 21 |
Orange S.A. | 13 | 7 | 20 |
JVC Kenwood | 10 | 8 | 18 |
Apple | 2 | 7 | 9 |
Beijing Xiaomi Mobile Software Co. | 0 | 6 | 6 |
NEC | 0 | 6 | 6 |
Sharp Corporation | 5 | 0 | 5 |
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) | 1 | 4 | 5 |
Cisco Systems | 1 | 3 | 4 |
ZTE Corporation | 0 | 2 | 2 |
Cisco Technology | 1 | 0 | 1 |
Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. | 0 | 1 | 1 |
Hewlett-Packard Company | 0 | 1 | 1 |
Newracom, Inc. | 0 | 1 | 1 |
Vestel Elektronik Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S. | 1 | 0 | 1 |
Total (All Manufacturers) | 1620 | 6296 | 7912 |
This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.
The following organizations hold one or more patents in the Via-LA VC-1 patent pool. LG has now removed their 3 patents from the pool, I have kept them listed in the table below as those patents are still valid patents.
Organization | Active patents | Expired patents | Total patents |
---|---|---|---|
Microsoft | 74 | 398 | 472 |
Panasonic | 5 | 117 | 122 |
LG Electronics | 3 | 93 | 96 |
Samsung Electronics | 4 | 92 | 96 |
Dolby Laboratories | 8 | 96 | 104 |
Philips | 0 | 77 | 77 |
Hitachi | 0 | 60 | 60 |
Mitsubishi Electric | 0 | 52 | 52 |
Sony | 0 | 28 | 28 |
JVC Kenwood | 0 | 25 | 25 |
Toshiba | 0 | 21 | 21 |
Fujitsu | 0 | 20 | 20 |
Telenor | 0 | 19 | 19 |
Siemens | 2 | 16 | 18 |
AT&T Intellectual Property | 0 | 16 | 16 |
Sun Patent Trust | 0 | 12 | 12 |
Sharp Corporation | 0 | 8 | 8 |
Orange S.A. | 0 | 7 | 7 |
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone | 0 | 4 | 4 |
Pantech | 0 | 4 | 4 |
ZTE | 0 | 1 | 1 |
Total (All Manufacturers) | 96 | 1166 | 1262 |
MP3 is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners; for example, compared to CD-quality digital audio, MP3 compression can commonly achieve a 75–95% reduction in size, depending on the bit rate. In popular usage, MP3 often refers to files of sound or music recordings stored in the MP3 file format (.mp3) on consumer electronic devices.
MPEG-2 is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods, which permit storage and transmission of movies using currently available storage media and transmission bandwidth. While MPEG-2 is not as efficient as newer standards such as H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC, backwards compatibility with existing hardware and software means it is still widely used, for example in over-the-air digital television broadcasting and in the DVD-Video standard.
MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related technology agreed upon by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) under the formal standard ISO/IEC 14496 – Coding of audio-visual objects. Uses of MPEG-4 include compression of audiovisual data for Internet video and CD distribution, voice and broadcast television applications. The MPEG-4 standard was developed by a group led by Touradj Ebrahimi and Fernando Pereira.
Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distribution of video content, used by 91% of video industry developers as of September 2019. It supports a maximum resolution of 8K UHD.
Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) standards are an international set of standards for broadcast and digital television transmission over terrestrial, cable and satellite networks. It is largely a replacement for the analog NTSC standard and, like that standard, is used mostly in the United States, Mexico, Canada, South Korea and Trinidad & Tobago. Several former NTSC users, such as Japan, have not used ATSC during their digital television transition, because they adopted other systems such as ISDB developed by Japan, and DVB developed in Europe, for example.
SMPTE 421, informally known as VC-1, is a video coding format. Most of it was initially developed as Microsoft's proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 in 2003. With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile, it was officially approved as a SMPTE standard on April 3, 2006. It was primarily marketed as a lower-complexity competitor to the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard. After its development, several companies other than Microsoft asserted that they held patents that applied to the technology, including Panasonic, LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics.
MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual is a video compression format developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It uses block-wise motion compensation and a discrete cosine transform (DCT), similar to previous standards such as MPEG-1 Part 2 and H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2.
In patent law, a patent pool is a consortium of two or more companies agreeing to cross-license patents relating to a particular technology. The creation of a patent pool can save patentees and licensees time and money, and, in case of blocking patents, it may also be the only reasonable method for making the invention available to the public. Competition law issues are usually important when a large consortium is formed.
MPEG-4 SLS, or MPEG-4 Scalable to Lossless as per ISO/IEC 14496-3:2005/Amd 3:2006 (Scalable Lossless Coding), is an extension to the MPEG-4 Part 3 (MPEG-4 Audio) standard to allow lossless audio compression scalable to lossy MPEG-4 General Audio coding methods (e.g., variations of AAC). It was developed jointly by the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) and Fraunhofer, which commercializes its implementation of a limited subset of the standard under the name of HD-AAC. Standardization of the HD-AAC profile for MPEG-4 Audio is under development (as of September 2009).
MPEG LA was an American company based in Denver, Colorado that licensed patent pools covering essential patents required for use of the MPEG-2, MPEG-4, IEEE 1394, VC-1, ATSC, MVC, MPEG-2 Systems, AVC/H.264 and HEVC standards.
Multi View Video Coding is a stereoscopic video coding standard for video compression that allows for encoding video sequences captured simultaneously from multiple camera angles in a single video stream. It uses the 2D plus Delta method and it is an amendment to the H.264 video compression standard, developed jointly by MPEG and VCEG, with the contributions from a number of companies, such as Panasonic and LG Electronics.
High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding. In comparison to AVC, HEVC offers from 25% to 50% better data compression at the same level of video quality, or substantially improved video quality at the same bit rate. It supports resolutions up to 8192×4320, including 8K UHD, and unlike the primarily 8-bit AVC, HEVC's higher fidelity Main 10 profile has been incorporated into nearly all supporting hardware.
HTML video is a subject of the HTML specification as the standard way of playing video via the web. Introduced in HTML5, it is designed to partially replace the object element and the previous de facto standard of using the proprietary Adobe Flash plugin, though early adoption was hampered by lack of agreement as to which video coding formats and audio coding formats should be supported in web browsers. As of 2020, HTML video is the only widely supported video playback technology in modern browsers, with the Flash plugin being phased out.
WebM is an audiovisual media file format. It is primarily intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML video and the HTML audio elements. It has a sister project, WebP, for images. The development of the format is sponsored by Google, and the corresponding software is distributed under a BSD license.
Unified Speech and Audio Coding (USAC) is an audio compression format and codec for both music and speech or any mix of speech and audio using very low bit rates between 12 and 64 kbit/s. It was developed by Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and was published as an international standard ISO/IEC 23003-3 and also as an MPEG-4 Audio Object Type in ISO/IEC 14496-3:2009/Amd 3 in 2012.
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), also known as MPEG-DASH, is an adaptive bitrate streaming technique that enables high quality streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional HTTP web servers. Similar to Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) solution, MPEG-DASH works by breaking the content into a sequence of small segments, which are served over HTTP. An early HTTP web server based streaming system called SProxy was developed and deployed in the Hewlett Packard Laboratories in 2006. It showed how to use HTTP range requests to break the content into small segments. SProxy shows the effectiveness of segment based streaming, gaining best Internet penetration due to the wide deployment of firewalls, and reducing the unnecessary traffic transmission if a user chooses to terminate the streaming session earlier before reaching the end. Each segment contains a short interval of playback time of content that is potentially many hours in duration, such as a movie or the live broadcast of a sport event. The content is made available at a variety of different bit rates, i.e., alternative segments encoded at different bit rates covering aligned short intervals of playback time. While the content is being played back by an MPEG-DASH client, the client uses a bit rate adaptation (ABR) algorithm to automatically select the segment with the highest bit rate possible that can be downloaded in time for playback without causing stalls or re-buffering events in the playback. The current MPEG-DASH reference client dash.js offers both buffer-based (BOLA) and hybrid (DYNAMIC) bit rate adaptation algorithms. Thus, an MPEG-DASH client can seamlessly adapt to changing network conditions and provide high quality playback with few stalls or re-buffering events.
Fraunhofer FDK AAC is an open-source library for encoding and decoding digital audio in the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) format. Fraunhofer IIS developed this library for Android 4.1. It supports several Audio Object Types including MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AAC LC, HE-AAC, HE-AACv2 as well AAC-LD and AAC-ELD for real-time communication. The encoding library supports sample rates up to 96 kHz and up to eight channels.
The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) is a non-profit industry consortium headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts, and formed to develop open, royalty-free technology for multimedia delivery. It uses the ideas and principles of open web standard development to create video standards that can serve as alternatives to the hitherto dominant standards of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).
Versatile Video Coding (VVC), also known as H.266, ISO/IEC 23090-3, and MPEG-I Part 3, is a video compression standard finalized on 6 July 2020, by the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET) of the VCEG working group of ITU-T Study Group 16 and the MPEG working group of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29. It is the successor to High Efficiency Video Coding. It was developed with two primary goals – improved compression performance and support for a very broad range of applications.