[4] MPEG LA started operations in July 1997 immediately after receiving a Department of Justice Business Review Letter.

[5] During formation of the MPEG-2 standard, a working group of companies that participated in the formation of the MPEG-2 standard recognized that the biggest challenge to adoption was efficient access to essential patents owned by many patent owners.

[6][7] In June 2012, MPEG LA announced a call for patents essential to the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard.

[8] In September 2012, MPEG LA launched Librassay, which makes diagnostic patent rights from some of the world's leading research institutions available to everyone through a single license.

[9][10] On September 29, 2014, the MPEG LA announced their HEVC license which covers the patents from 23 companies.

[23] In April 2013, Google and MPEG LA announced an agreement covering the VP8 video format.