Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do content providers have to pay certain royalties with h.264? I thought the players were free of royalties and the license was paid for encoded content. And then with h.265 I thought I heard that there were two different license pools with different licensing strategies. I'm not sure that meme generators have royalties very high on their list of concerns, the big hosts that host a lot of them might have some concern…
For H.264 it's the opposite (for web content), only the players need to pay royalties. For H.265, both need to pay royalties, which depend on the business model. The licensing terms are pretty much totally unsuited for usage as a still image format. And yes, there are multiple pools and you have to pay all of them.
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/avcweb.pdf
H.264 is similar for the MPEG pool:
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/HEVC/Documents/HEVCweb.p...