Apple's fee fight: what's keeping QuickTime 6? (Mac Beat).

When Apple unveiled QuickTime 6 (see "Coming Attraction," Mac Beat, April 2002), the biggest surprise wasn't the multimedia technology's full support for MPEG-4, the emerging standard for high-quality streaming video. Rather, it was Apple's decision to delay QuickTime's launch because of a dispute over MPEG-4 licensing terms.

MPEG LA, which handles the royalties for 18 MPEG-4 patent holders, has proposed a royalty structure that would charge companies such as Apple for encoding and decoding MPEG-4 content, as well as for providing streaming content.

Frank ...

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