VQUAD powered by SwissQual

A new method that opens the door to objective video quality for HD television
phone: +41 32 686 65 65   email: info@swissqual.com

Unique Psycho-Visual & Cognitive Modeling

A key component of VQuad HD™ is the perceptually-motivated quality protection model VQuad HD™ performs a special analysis of the distribution of spatial degradations and puts special emphasis on the tail of distribution.

Standards and licensing

What is a standard?

A standard is "a document, established by consensus and approved by a recognized body that provides, for common and repeated use, rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or their results, aimed at the achievement of the optimum degree of order in a given context". Integrating it within an application or conforming its products with a standard is therefore considered as a guarantee of quality and result. (See ISO/IEC Guide 2-1991).

An ITU standard is a recommendation that has been approved by the International Telecommunication Union based in Geneva.

An ETSI standard is issued by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute based in Sophia Antipolis, France.

How is Intellectual Property related to a standard?

Even if the standard is public, standardization bodies allow the contributors to protect their innovations that are part of the standard with patents. The contributors (patent owners) on the other side have the obligation to allow access to these inventions under Fair, Reasonable And non-Discriminatory conditions.

The owner of essential patents could demand indemnification for their commercial use. The essentiality of a patent consists in the impossibility for a third party to use the standard without infringing this patent(s). Requesting indemnification is the only way for companies to recover part of their research investments made for the development of the standard. That means in other words, a company that wants to integrate a standardized technology in their product must obtain the right to use the essential patents held by the owners.

What is the 'ITU Patent Policy'?

Instead of being involved in patent licensing, the ITU is managing a patent database which contains the list of all IPR owners related to the standards. Potential users should consult the patent database before using an ITU recommendation for commercial purposes.

The URL for the patent database is: http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/ipr/Pages/default.aspx

Who needs a license for commercial use?

As soon as a company starts to use this IPR, a license agreement is needed. Usually, a license free of charge is often granted to use the IPR to develop, demonstrate or evaluate a product. Once the product will be exploited commercially (i.e. sold), royalties may be charged for. You should approach the IPR owners before developing or releasing a product and ask for a license agreement.

Does ITU’s download fee include a license?

No, it does not. The ITU provides only technical information of standard documents without getting involved in IPR issues. For this reason, the download fee just covers the expenses of the ITU but the royalties for a patent license are not included.

Commercial use of standard without taking a license?

According to patent law, if you offer products for sale that infringes third parties patents, then you should expect that the IPR owners may start legal proceedings against your company. Usually it ends up in court, which outcome is that you will have to pay to patent owner for compensation.

J.341 standard

What is J.341

J.341 is the new ITU-T standard for Objective perceptual multimedia video quality measurement of HDTV for digital cable television in the presence of a full reference. At the January 2011 meeting of the ITU-T, J.341 was officially approved as new ITU-T recommendation. The standard was developed by SwissQual AG between 2008 and 2010 and was adopted by ITU-T SG9. Is J.341 the only standard for full reference HDTV video quality measurement?

J.341 is the only full-reference approach for HDTV resolutions that has official ITU-T approval. Although some vendors might claim an equivalent standard, those approaches are not recognized as standard by the international community. Who owns the Intellectual Property Rights of J.341

VQuad-HD™ is SwissQual’s implementation of the ITU-T standard J.341. All copyrights therein are the property of SwissQual AG and are protected by EU, US and other patents. Any commercial use of the standard requires a license, which may be obtained from SwissQual AG Allmendweg 8, 4528 Zuchwil, Switzerland, who acts as the sole licensing party.

The VQuad-HD™ is a trade mark of SwissQual and VQuad® is registered trade mark of SwissQual.

VQuad-HD licensing

SwissQual AG is the only owner of IPRs of J.341. That means you need not to contact any other party for licensing. SwissQual is a single source and contract partner for the VQuad-HD technology.

Evaluation package

The VQuad-HD Eval Package targets at vendors, who consider the licensing of OEM VQuad-HD package
The Eval Package includes:

The Eval Package is made available against a non-disclosure agreement.

VQuad-HD Small Volume Business Model

The Small Volume Business Model is composed of a Basic Package, and individual Runtime Licenses of VQUAD-HD. A minimum order is a Basic Package a non-recurring and one-time license fee. Each copy would be registered to the final user and will be copy protected, e.g. by a HW or SW dongle. For a limited number of copies this approach will give you access to the VQuad-HD technology. This package includes:

Please let us know some basics of your tool configuration in order to generate your individual quote.

VQuad-HD OEM Business Model

SwissQual offers OEM License Agreement that covers the use of ITU-T J.341 recommendation. OEM package includes:

The royalty model for the OEM Package is composed of two components,

Branding and Website Design by fathom