[Skunkworks] MPEG4 Royalties on Set Top Boxes-Clarification Needed.

I've seen an advert about Set Top Digital boxes and it says they use MPEG-4 as the compression format. A couple of years back I was doing research into audio/video formats as I was developing a playback tool. I came across articles that seem to suggest that if one uses MPEG (and the MP3 family) to compress and distribute content then one has to pay a fee (royalty). The info is sketchy and that's what makes the issue interesting.   The above has led to the success of OGG (Vorbis and Theora), which perform equal if not better than the above.   I wonder if our media houses are aware of the above, coz it seems their digital content will be compressed with MPEG-4.   o_O?