- Korea holds the most number of patents related to DMB video coding -

The application of patents related to video coding technology, which compresses and restores motion picture data, is increasing greatly. The ratio of domestic companies’ application turned out to be very high, suggesting a close relationship with last year’s satellite Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) commercial service and world’s first terrestrial DMB launched in Korea.


Video coding is a core technology in multimedia transfer. During the past 10 years, this technology has shown remarkable development. Thousands of domestic and foreign patent technologies have been developed, and at the same time, standardization organizations have selected MPEG-1, MPEG-2, H.263, and MPEG-4, as the international standards. These are commonly used in various signal processing for media around us, such as DVD and HDTV.


According to data provided by KIPO, the number of patent applications related to video coding reached 1068 during the 5-year period from 1999 to 2003. This number is based on applications that have been disclosed. Among these applications, 541 were submitted by South Koreans (50.7%), 218 by Europeans (20.4%), 205 by Japanese (19.2%), 99 by Americans (9.3%) and 5 by others nationalities (0.5%). South Koreans submitted more than half of all applications.


In 2004, the number of patent applications had reached 297, based on the ones that have been disclosed. Considering that there are many undisclosed applications, and that the number in 2004 (297) increased compared to 2003 (253), it is easy to see the increasing trend of patent applications.


The explosive increase of domestic applications seems to be related to the world’s first commercial service of DMB that was launched in Korea using state-of-the-art video coding technology. This technology allows the transfer of high-quality broadcasting images of various channels using limited frequency bandwidth possible.


Korea is also leading the international standard of video coding for the mobile broadcasting standard of both Europe and America, which are competing each other to promote a different standard. According to the announcement on February 1, 2006 by MPEG LA, a management agent for international patents related to video coding technology, the number of patents related to the standard technology of H.264 was 109, held by 18 companies. With 53 patents (48.6%), Korean companies (LG Electronic, Samsung Electronic, ETRI) are holding most of the patents, followed by Japanese with 22 (20.2%), European with 21 (19.3%) and American with 13 (11.9%).


Although there is no direct way to check the proportionate relationship between the number of standardized patents and royalty fees, the interesting point is that the patent application ratio for each country related to video coding during 5 years after 1999 is very similar to the ratio of standardized patents among countries. The fact that Korea ranks at the top with 53 patents (48.6%) registered at MPEG LA relating to H.264 (video standard of DMB) shows the technological status of the country, recognized globally for DMB royalty fees and technology development.


DMB adopts a cutting-edge coding technology called H.264 (or MPEG-4 AVC). It is the video standard selected by both terrestrial (currently in test broadcasting) and satellite (currently in commercial service).DMB. The compression efficiency of H264 is about 60% improved compared to MPEG-2 and about 40% improved compared to MPEG-4. In short, this technology is leading the development and commercialization of mobile broadcasting by compressing mass video files into very narrow bandwidth. Such high transfer efficiency is essential for high-quality broadcasting in a mobile environment.


The runtime of a DMB mobile device is still less than two hours. This falls short of that of the European DVB-H or American MediaFLO, which is four hours. However, video coding technology is continuously evolving. Research and development will not end at data compression, but expand to fields such as low-power video coding algorithms and SoC-type video decoding chips to gain competitive advantage. Domestic and foreign patent applications related to video coding are expected to increase continuously with the competition to secure the technology standard.