Insane in absolute terms, but not per user. Take look at the actual fee schedule [1]. The most costly is the license for cable TV, which costs 50¢ per year per subscriber. The least costly is social media, which goes up to whopping 4.5¢ per MAU per user.

I very much understand how the licensing alliance likely was bothered by the fact that they are leaving money on the table, when TikTok's revenue per user is $50 a year, and a cable subscription is easily $800 per year, with the high-end reaching $2000. The big players aren't going to notice much. For the small players, nothing changed.

[1]: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/3wzYaofEETCfXdQmREx9BK-120...

I think the dumb part is that it's not like decoding or encoding video becomes harder when there's more users. The effort to write code for encoding for a small service of 1000 users and a large service of 10 million users is the exact same. We really don't need middlemen extracting everything they can, which will drive up costs.

Is it insane at all? The biggest fees are charged to the biggest providers. With short form video now the dominant form of addictive social media content, it doesn’t seem insane at all that large media companies ought to compensate inventors/owners of patented video technology. A company with 100 million or more subscribers is not a company I feel a lot of empathy for if they’re trying to avoid paying licensing fees.