No cost?
The cost of Dolby AC-4 is clear and affordable.
For devices
The cost of Dolby AC-4 covers more than just a patent licensing fee. It includes a patent license, an optimized software development kit, test streams, documentation, three-tier support, and product certification services.
Dolby AC-4 is a complete solution that is standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the same organization that publishes DVB standards.
Dolby AC-4 is competitively priced, with rates that are actually lower than the rates for Dolby Digital and Dolby Digital Plus™. Dolby only charges for one technology per device, which means that Dolby AC-4 effectively costs nothing in devices that include our existing technologies.
For content producers and distributors
We have never charged content fees for our licensed technologies, and we do not plan to do so with AC-4.
For pro-partners
In professional audio products, such as real-time or file-based encoders, we charge a flat annual usage fee per product model or B2B service in which such a product is used. Manufacturers can include multiple Dolby professional technologies for a single price. The annual usage fee is $25,000.- for transcoders and $8,000.- for decoders or QC tools.
Dolby AC-4 is a complete package
We provide a complete technology package to the industry for Dolby AC-4. The package includes everything needed to implement Dolby AC-4, including object and source code as necessary, a reference implementation, test streams, and the backing of our global support teams.
The code that we provide is optimized, and we continually improve it to provide the highest efficiency for our partners’ processors, apps, and devices. It’s easy to implement and designed to solve real-world problems.
