Via Licensing Corp. has announced that it is developing a patent pool for the Extended High Efficiency AAC (xHE-AAC).
A recent update to the Advanced Audio Coding range of technologies from standardized by ISO MPEG, xHE-AAC combines a speech coder with a general audio coder for a single audio coding system that can achieve low bitrates with either speech, music or ambient sounds. Digital Radio Mondiale uses xHE-AAC as its audio coding format.
xHE-AAC patent owners — which include Dolby Laboratories, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Fraunhofer IIS, Koninklijke Philips N.V., Orange S.A., Sony, and VoiceAge Corporation — have worked with Via Licensing to establish this patent pool. As a result, third parties will be able to license the xHE-AAC technology for a fee.
AAC pool licensees will be able to add a license grant for xHE-AAC to an existing AAC license agreement. The license fees are inclusive of underlying AAC patents.
Via Licensing plans to launch the patent pool during the second quarter of 2016.
