Hope this pushes the royalty-free alternatives more. That's a crazy jump.
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4500% increase
Absolute financial parasitism. This is why we can't have nice things. People who own a license of something critical can just sit on their asses decades on end and collect unearned income from other companies who will in turn move to cost to the consumers.
Remember when Martin Shkreli was thrown in jail for hiking the price of medicine by 5555%? That was 2017, but when something like this happens in 2026 nobody bats an eye.
See also: capitalism more generally
More specifically late-stage capitalism. This is a classic example of rent-seeking by a capitalist who has cornered a market.
Well it’s their developed tech and they see streaming sites raise their prices and rake money.
dolby technologies aren't even the most advanced, they're just the most marketed, most expensive, most cutthroat in the industry
I thought h.264 patents are expired
Edit: it was patented in 2003, so 20 year period is gone already
Wikipedia covers it nicely:
Since the first version of the standard was completed in May 2003 (22 years ago) and the most commonly used profile (the High profile) was completed in June 2004[citation needed] (21 years ago), some of the relevant patents are expired by now,[75] while others are still in force in jurisdictions around the world and one of the US patents in the MPEG LA H.264 pool (granted in 2016) lasts at least until November 2030.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding?wprov=sfla1
So paying is optional? I don't get it..
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