Google Acquiring VP3 Developer On2 Technologies 133
R.Mo_Robert writes "BetaNews is reporting that Google is acquiring On2, the video codec company and original developers of the VP3 codec from which Theora is derived. The article suggests that this may mean Google is backing Ogg Theora as the HTML5 video standard, but this is likely not the case--with Theora already being open-source and On2 having disclaimed all rights and patents, there is no reason Google should have needed to do this to push Theora. You may recall from some time back that HTML5 no longer specifies which video codec(s) a browser should support due to there being, unfortunately, no suitable codec at this time. But Google (known for supporting H.264) practically owns Web video with YouTube in most people's minds, so their influence could really swing the future of HTML5 video either way. It remains to be seen whether Google's acquisition of On2 has any bearing on their plans for video on the Web."
No suitable codec? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a bit misleading. There are several suitable codecs. The problem is the major players involved with their "Not Invented Here" mentalities.
Re:Chrome, HTML5 disaster coming (Score:5, Insightful)
Chrome supports anything it can legally
Firefox supports anything it can legally
Safari supports anything it can legally
IE tries using only WMV for a little while, then opens up to other formats to slow the exodus.
I could see Google and Apple using their websites to push one codec or another, but I think they want their browsers to be as capable as possible.
Used by Youtube (Score:3, Insightful)
They're already buying the milk. Might as well just pay for the cow.
Re:No suitable codec? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually the problem isn't "NOT Invented Here" it's "Invented Here - please pay us". So Theora doesn't have the quality, but H.264 is patented. Neither is suitable to all interests for those reasons. Those were the leading contenders, others suffer from the same issues. So now that Google owns a good codec, clearly they'll use it. The question is weather they'll let others use it and on what terms. IMHO they should allow anyone to use it for free. Adding yet another proprietary codec to the web would be detrimental, while the upside of codec licensing is probably small potatoes to Google. Freeing a good codec would mean easy access to Google video for everyone and not-as-easy access to MS and Apple.
Re:VP3 is old (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Google wanted VP8 because it is a great ARM cod (Score:2, Insightful)
But lot's of media oriented ARM platform already got h264 (and other) hardware accelerator...
It will be difficult to beat them with pure software.
Why Google is doing this (Score:4, Insightful)
Google can now use On2 codecs such as VP8 in YouTube, for free. No more royalties. But the royalties are not that expensive [businessinsider.com] so this isn't likely a big deal for them. (Google could save more money by using smarter settings on their H.264 encoder [xiph.org].)
Do you think Google will seriously try to make money by selling codecs? I don't. $100 million is small change to Google, and if that's all it cost to buy On2, then the On2 revenue stream must be trivial by Google's standards.
So, Google won't save much money and won't make much money by buying On2. I think they are up to something else.
What I think is more interesting is the possibility that Google will give On2's latest technology to the Theora guys. Just as Sun started giving away OpenOffice.org after buying StarOffice, it's likely that Google will give away some or all of the On2 technology.
Despite being based on technology that is nearly a decade old, Theora is already fairly competitive [mozillazine.org] for web video. (Theora is better than H.263, which has actually been used for years, so it's difficult to argue that Theora is not usable for web video.) Now imagine that Theora gets the best technology bits from a modern On2 codec, and integrates those, such that Theora really is as good as H.264, or even better.
Now imagine that this improved Theora is bundled with Google Chrome and Firefox, bundled with Android, and bundled with Google Chrome OS. Within a few years, Theora could become firmly established everywhere as a baseline standard that anyone can use.
Google likes things that make it easier for Google's customers to use Google's services. They like their customers not being locked into proprietary technologies not owned by Google. It will be impossible for Google to take the market away from H.264, but it is very possible that they could make sure their customers can always easily access their services.
Note that this scenario utterly depends on the new Theora being free software. Google could try to sell a proprietary On2 codec and gain a significant market share; well, if they try it, all I can say is "good luck with that." It's hard to push out an established standard; to do it, you need to be significantly better, not just a little bit better. Better technology, with Google behind it, completely free (and with no need to even keep track of how many codecs you ship out) might succeed.
steveha
Re:Google probably wants the engineering taltent. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's likely that they want the company's IP, too. Go back and look at the whole HTML 5 and Theora debate. Apparently Google is paying some kind of licensing fee for h264 for both YouTube and Chrome, probably for Android and ChromeOS too if they're providing support. Theora is an open source version of On2's codec that is both old and doesn't have any hardware support.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to guess that Google wants to open up On2's most recent codecs and try to push other companies to support it. That way they could use the same video formats for all their products without paying additional licensing fees. Plus, they can move YouTube to using HTML5's "video" tag without having to keep a Theora copy to support Firefox/Linux and a h264 copy to support Safari/iPods/iPhones/AppleTVs. Think of what they'll save on transcoding and storage.
Question... (Score:3, Insightful)
How is a company that makes video codecs worth $106.5 M? I for one am very confused.
And for God's sake please give me a Slashdot 1.0 theme! I can't take this JavaScript-laden hell.
Re:No suitable codec? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well I don't think that's quite right, either. You have to choose between a poorer-quality codec with no hardware support and a widely-supported codec with better quality but requires a licensing fee.
Re:Google wanted VP8 because it is a great ARM cod (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, many of those ARM Media-Oriented SoC's (Read: anything from TI, Qualcomm, NVidia, etc...) actually have media DSPs and they're doing the h.264 decode with the DSP core instead of dedicated hardware...
In any case where you see one of the new ARM Cortex-A8/A9 based media chips, you'll be able to implement h.264 or VP3-VP8 in the system with relative ease. Including the iPhone...
Re:VP3 is old (Score:1, Insightful)
I would imagine the overhead costs to run YouTube are pretty much related to the amount of storage and bandwidth required to deliver streaming videos. Reduce either of those, and you reduce the cost of running YouTube.
Maybe it was cheaper to buy the company and control where it puts its efforts than to wait for something "magical" to happen.