[jmvalin]

Getting something like AOM would have been easy back in 1993 because the costs would have been much lower. Back then complexity had to be really low, which means most of the complicated modern tools were off the table. Coming up with something equivalent to MPEG-1 would have required just a handful of engineers over maybe a year. In terms of IPR, there would also have been much less to check than today. OTOH, the minefield was moving really fast at the time, which could have added some complications. In the end, I think the main reason nobody bothered with something AOM-like is that few people realized the huge problem of patents on standards.

[niftich]

~1993 is around when CompuServe and Unisys began negotiating about the implications of patented LZW in GIF files, but the issue didn't become public until 1994, but the community rebounded spectacularly by developing PNG in 1995.

So perhaps the cutoff year of 1993 is right before the threat of non-pooled patents was well-publicized.

There was a lot of video codec innovation back then too, but everything aside from the MPEG or ITU-T codecs was proprietary, and everyone took out patents. To Monty's point, the sheer number of endpoints capable of consuming digital video whose consumption somehow results in income for the publishers was just not quite there, making an alternate push for deriving revenue from DSP IP than patent licensing fees much less likely.