Apple isn't exactly the champion of free standards. Is HLS free for others to adopt? DASH is. The same messed up story happened with touch events for JavaScript. What Apple were pushing wasn't free.
That's MPEG-LA patent trolls, nothing to do with MPEG in MPEG-DASH for the reference. They can claim they own the Moon the same way. They do it with anything that looks usable and related to video. Patent trolls aren't really the measure of how free the standard is.
Apple however are the owners of HLS, and unlike some random patent trolls, if they are insisting on its adoption, they have to make sure their patents on it are royalty free. Not that it will protect anyone from further patent tolls attacks from the likes of MPEG-LA, but that's a requirement.
Apple has never been shy about communicating which technologies of theirs they have patented. While it would be nice to have an explicit statement from Apple, the absence of it speaks volumes.
Has MPEG made any statement about the MPEG-LA patent pool?
> While it would be nice to have an explicit statement from Apple, the absence of it speaks volumes.
I'm not sure what that means. Either they released it royalty free or not. Since there is no public statement about it, there is no reason to assume it's free.
> Has MPEG made any statement about the MPEG-LA patent pool?
I don't think anyone cares to make statements about patent trolls. The only effective way to deal with them is to bust their claims in court, which not many want to do.
Citation needed :)
From https://www.mpegla.com/programs/dash/
> The royalty for DASH Clients, which is now payable from January 1, 2017 forward, remains US $0.05 per unit after the first 100,000 units each year.