> Is there any analysis that supports to this statement?

Why are you asking for analysis? Aren't the lists of patents in the pools published? You can look directly at the source materials.

> Having seen many hundreds of patents, many of them in the video encoding area, I wouldn't hesitate to describe most of them as incremental improvements.

Certainly they aren't revolutionary, but you're ignoring the question of whether they're incremental improvements over existing patents or over the public domain. If the question is whether a patent reduces the incentive for others to make incremental improvements, finding an incremental improvement to something that exists in the public domain provides no such evidence.

> Also, the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Google end up paying the MPEG-LA much, much more than what they get paid for their share of the patents in the pool. They certainly do not cancel out

Do you have some evidence of this? For any company whose percentage of patents in the pool is proportional to their market share in the market, basic arithmetic says the royalties should cancel.

> if they had their way, they'd rather not pay anything at all. Unfortunately, with those codecs enjoying so much popular hardware support, they have little choice but to partake in the pool and pay their dues.

These are the companies that make the hardware or who tell the hardware makers what to make. If they collectively wanted to make the patent pool go away they could all just support both for a couple of generations while announcing immediately when support for the old codec will be discontinued so that people can stop using it. For some reason they don't.

> Anyone willing to contribute innovation to the market has a simple option: invent some technology that is valuable enough to be included in the standard, offer their own patents to the pool and get a share of the licensing pie.

But that's not how the standards bodies work. Nobody wants NPE patents in the pool but the NPE, and NPEs don't get a vote in the standards body. There are two primary ways that NPEs get royalties from the pool. The first is patents that cover the standard but nobody knew that when the standard was finalized or they would have fixed it, the classic submarine patent. You can't make money on this except by accident or by dishonesty. The second is patents that are so unreasonably broad they can't be avoided no matter what you do even if you know about them ahead of time. These are a defect in the patent office which shouldn't have issued them. No part of his involves some nice fellows in lab coats making decent wages without doing anything untoward.

> That way, inventors can do what they are good at (inventing) and vendors can do what they are good at (implementing and commercializing). Classic division of labour.

Patent pools have nothing to do with division of labor. They're an evolved response to patent thickets. Division of labor is: you get a patent and you sell it to a practicing entity who uses it to enjoy a competitive advantage. Patent pools only happen when there are so many patents you can't help tripping over them and the industry is trying to make the problem go away as best it can.