Internet Video Coding is a video coding standard. IVC was created by MPEG, and was intended to be a royalty-free video coding standard for use on the Internet, as an alternative to non-free formats such as AVC and HEVC. As such, IVC was designed to only use coding techniques which were not covered by royalty-requiring patents. According to MPEG founder and chairman Leonardo Chiariglione "IVC is practically dead", because 3 companies made statements "I may have patents and I am willing to license them at FRAND terms" covering IVC, meaning that implementations might have to pay money to the companies. This patent threat meant that IVC was practically unusable for its intended purpose as a legally safe royalty-free video coding format. ITU-T/ITU-R/ISO/IEC defines 3 types of patent licensing. The goal for IVC was to only use techniques patented under type 1, while the 3 companies said they may have patents under type 2. The text of the code of practice is as follows:
2.1 The patent holder is willing to negotiate licences free of charge with other parties on a non-discriminatory basis on reasonable terms and conditions. Such negotiations are left to the parties concerned and are performed outside ITU-T/ITU-R/ISO/IEC. 2.2 The patent holder is willing to negotiate licences with other parties on a non-discriminatory basis on reasonable terms and conditions. Such negotiations are left to the parties concerned and are performed outside ITU-T/ITU-R/ISO/IEC. 2.3 The patent holder is not willing to comply with the provisions of either paragraph 2.1 or paragraph 2.2; in such case, the Recommendation | Deliverable shall not include provisions depending on the patent.
Web Video Coding, proposed jointly by Apple, Cisco, Fraunhofer HHI, Magnum Semiconductors, Polycom, RIM, etc.. Web Video Coding was another name for the Constrained MPEG-4 AVC baseline profile.
Video Coding for Browsers, proposed by Google and identical to Google's VP8.
Internet Video Coding, proposed by several universities, and developed from scratch.
Web Video Coding did not have a guarantee from all patent holders that the patents covering Web Video Coding would be licensed royalty-free. As IVC's compression performance outperformed WVC and VCB, IVC was approved as ISO/IEC 14496-33 in June 2015.
