Broadcom is trumpeting another legal victory in its IP fight with Netflix in Germany, announcing that the German Federal Patent Court has issued a preliminary opinion that a Broadcom patent related to HEVC/H.265 video encoding is valid.

The declaration comes after a Munich court ruled in September that Netflix's use of HEVC,  a codec used for transporting 4K video also known as H.265, violates Broadcom's "'366" patent. 

Netflix apparently didn't abide by the Munich court's injunction, so Broadcom sought the Federal Patent Court ruling. Broadcom said it also filed a motion with the Munich court, seeking penalties for Netflix's alleged violation of its patent. 

"Under section 890 of the German Civil Procedure Code, penalties for violating the injunction include: (1) government fines of up to €250,000 for each act of infringement, such as each time Netflix sends an infringing video stream to a German subscriber; and/or (2) up to six month’s imprisonment for members of the infringer’s board of directors," Broadcom says in its press release announcing the Patent Court decision. 

The German Federal Patent Court is scheduled to give a final ruling on the matter on July 18, 2024, after hearing oral arguments. 

Netflix has yet to publicly comment on the injunction.

Netflix and Broadcom have been beefing since 2018, with the video tech company also contesting Dutch and U.S. patents related to HEVC. And it's likely not the last patent dispute we'll see tied to use of HEVC. 

Within its Europe/Middle East/Africa region quadrant, Germany is Netflix's second largest market next to the UK, with over 10 million paid users in 2021, according to Statista. 

HEVC Advance, a licensing administrator for HEVC/H.265 patents, announced this week that it has eliminated “subscription” and “title-by-title” content distribution from its patent license as it looks to speed the adoption of the bit-saving codec among streaming, pay TV, over-the-air and satellite video distributors.

That move basically eliminates content distribution royalty fees and reduces certain royalty rates and caps, the organization said.

Further, the org said it has expanded its discounts for Region 1 Lower-Priced Connected Home and Other Devices Categories to include sales up to $80 per unit, and cut its combined $45 million Device and Content Distribution Enterprise caps to a single Enterprise cap of $40 million. It has also expanded its Trademark Program discounts to include physical media, while physical content distribution (i.e. Blu-ray discs) and devices will continue to be licensed.

StreamingMedia.com has a side-by-side comparison of the old versus new approach. Examples of companies on the HEVC Advance licensor list includes Dolby Laboratories, Humax, Philips, Samsung Electronics, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Mitsubishi Electric Corp., and GE Video Compression.

“HEVC Advance has worked hard since its inception to facilitate HEVC adoption and enable consumers to enjoy the best video experience. By eliminating non-physical HEVC content distribution from our license, we are transforming to meet the needs of distributors looking to adopt HEVC and bring the incredible bandwidth savings and clarity of 4K UHD to consumers,” HEVC Advance CEO Peter Moller, said in a statement.

Dan Rayburn, principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, and chairman of next month’s NAB Streaming Summit, said other pressures led the group in this direction:

Patent licensing group HEVC Advance caves to pressure. Will no longer "license nor seek royalty fees for non-physical #HEVC content distribution including Internet streaming, cable, over-the-air broadcast and satellite". Has also discounted other fees. See https://t.co/5uAHLigkPF

— Dan Rayburn (@DanRayburn) March 14, 2018

StreamingMedia.com, meanwhile points out that MPEG LA, another HEVC patent pool, doesn’t currently charge for HEVC-encoded content, but hasn’t ruled it out, either. Examples of licensors in the MPEG LA HEVC program include Apple, BBC, Funai Electric, NTT, Siemens Corp., and Vidyo.

The revisions to the HEVC Advance patent license also come amid adoption of Google-developed open/royalty free VP9, and as some big names get behind the emerging AV1 video codec.

RELATED: Facebook Adds Heft to AV1 Video Codec Group

When it comes to video encoding sales, the price doesn’t necessarily have to be right.

That’s one of the takeaways I got from a new customer survey conducted by TechValidate Research on behalf of encoding firm and overall multiscreen video tech specialist firm Envivio, which found that most (68%) tapped in to add support for new services, while 43% were looking to improve their video compression efficiency.

Julien Signès, Envivio’s CEO, said he wasn’t surprised by those results, as there is currently a major emphasis on video quality for video transcoding and encoding. But he admits that such evaluations require a fairly complex process, as customers use a variety of methodologies and criteria to gauge quality. “It’s more of a grey area in a way,” he said.

Following quality, product reliability is the second decision-driver. And that in itself opens up a religious debate of sorts, as some customers still prefer to use hardware-based encoding versus a more software-centric approach such as Envivio’s.

While reliability and quality has historically been one of the trade-offs of software-based encoding running on off-the-shelf hardware, Signès is convinced that the gap (and the perception of that gap) is closing rapidly.

Overall, he said product picks are coming down to “summary features,” based, for example, on the number of types of screens that a platform can support, if the system can support multiple codecs, something that continues to be important as operators and content owners start to gravitate to HEVC/H.265.

“Features are where we feel software grants you a big advantage… and is as good as a hardware solution,” Signès, but notes that “some people are still in denial.”

Still, price still factors into those decisions, right? Absolutely. And it depends on the size of the customer.

Among tier 1 providers, they tend to dictate a target price, and it’s up to the vendor to fit it. Without that, “it’s tough to be considered,” Signès said. 

Here’s another sampling of what else is making news as the IBC show (September 11-16) gets rolling in Amsterdam (please go here for our first IBC news roundup):

-Media data management and analytics company Mediamorph has raised a $10 million in a  Series B found led by Liberty Global Ventures, with help from  Smedvig Capital, an existing Mediamorph investor. Mediamorph, which has raised $23 million so far according to Crunchbase (Mediamorph confirmed that figure), said it expects to close the round soon, with the participation of one or two more additional investors. The latest round, “will help us invest in our data management platform and bring on key hires to further scale our business,” Rob Gardos, the recently named CEO of Mediamorph, said in a statement.

-Elliptic Technologies said it is working with CableLabs to provide a reference implementation for DLNA’s CVP-2 (Commercial Video Profile-2) specs that utilizes Elliptic’s tVault for DTCP-IP (Digital Transmission Content Protection over Internet Protocol)  security system. DLNA just unveiled “VidiPath” as the consumer-facing brand and label for a certification program that will test CE video devices, including retail products, that are capable of supporting an MVPD’s full suite of services and user interface. Elliptic and CableLabs will provide a CVP-2 server reference design that uses Elliptic’s security and will facilitate client testing and the interoperability of VidiPath/CVP-2 devices.

-Cisco Systems said it’s expanding its Videoscape Virtualized Video Processing (V2P) system to virtualize and orchestrate the key functions required to deliver multiscreen video. Instead of requiring pay-TV operators to hardwire optimized gear for each type of screen, Cisco claims that its new orchestrated approach creates a common pool of hardware and software for multiscreen delivery.

-Broadcom has unleashed a family of eight hybrid satellite/terrestrial broadcast chipsets for set-top boxes that support High Efficiency Video Compression (HEVC)/H.265, a codec that is billed as 50% more bandwidth-efficient than MPEG-4/H.264. Broadcom said it’s also combining HEVC with the modulation efficiencies of DVB-S2, DVB-T2 (terrestrial standard for Europe and South Africa) , ISDB-T (terrestrial standard for Brazil, Latin America, the Philippines, Botswana and Japan) and ATSC (North America and Korea), and home-side IP connectivity using the 2.0 version of the Multimedia over Coax Alliance standard.

-IneoQuest Technologies said it has inked a deal to supply  video headend monitoring systems to Kabel Deutschland, the largest cable operator in Germany. KD’s systems connect about 8.3 million homes.

-Accedo has launched Accedo VIA, a next-gen multiscreen platform for PCs, smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and gaming consoles. Accedo stitched VIA together in tandem with several tech partners, including DivX, Elemental Technologies, Movideo, MPP, NexStreaming, NXP Software, Ooyala, PayWizard, Comcast-owned thePlatform, Verimatrix, Vimond, VisualOn and Xstream.

Over Labor Day weekend, an email exchange unfolded with a former cable guy, Dave Archer, who now heads Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology in Reno.

The gist: He’d been contacted by a reporter who was wondering if Reno was less attractive to high-tech companies because it doesn’t have Gigabit broadband services.

“At some point in the conversation, I told him that wanting fiber to your home was like wanting a 747 to go to the grocery store,” he wrote. He added, “Then I realized I’d used that same analogy — in 1980.”

Archer asked for some links to prior columns on the topic, so I sent him five or so, plus some basics on “how to do the math” of estimating household bandwidth usage. It seems useful to pass that along.

Know going in that there’s a big caveat in any discussion involving the relative “weight” when shipping video over broadband: Compression engines. They keep getting better, which changes the math. Regularly.

Let’s say, for purposes of this discussion, that HD video compressed with MPEG-4 weighs about 3 Megabits per second, and that the same video compressed with MPEG-2 weighs 5 Mbps. (Expect violent disagreement on these numbers, should you choose to use them. Consider them a starting point. You’ll still win!)

Tablets, smartphones, laptops, PCs and their ilk use MPEG-4 compression. It’s newer than MPEG-2. There’s another one coming, “HEVC,” for High Efficiency Video Codec. It’s the capacity antidote to 4K/Ultra HD video.

TVs connected via a set-top box use MPEG-2 compression, as well as a completely different distribution path. But let’s throw them into the mix anyway, because we still won’t get anywhere near a Gig!

Picture a big, broadband-slurping house. In it are five HDTVs, all streaming live video via set-top boxes. That’s 25 Mbps.

Add five laptops, also streaming HD video, for another 15 Mbps.

Lots of people in this house! Add 10 tablets, all streaming video, for 30 Mbps.

What the heck. Let’s pile on more laptops. Ten more, all streaming video. Add another 30 Mbps.

We’re up to 100 Mbps. A Gigabit is 1,000 Mbps. That’s an order of magnitude difference, literally, by this math.

Does Reno need a Gig to be sexy enough for high tech? Probably, but not for any reasons of logic. Perception is reality, and the reason the reporter called in the first place is proof of that.

Still, wanting a Gigabit per second is like wanting a jet ski. For the kiddie pool.

Stumped by gibberish? Visit Leslie Ellis attranslation-please.comormultichannel.com/blog.