So remember there was a flurry of talk about what was going to kill Flash a few months back?<p>This (meaning Google's fairly clear intention to make some kind of royalty free video codec from what it's just bought) has just killed Flash and moved the web forward about 5 years.<p>I wonder if they'll create a new standard around the technology (perhaps pair it with the Ogg container format or with Vorbis audio, run it past some standards org like IETF) and/or release it as is.<p>It's a fairly big move for Linux Multimedia support too.
VP8 is an amazing codec. If Google makes it available under FOSS terms, it would be huge. It's more CPU friendly than H.264 while providing better quality. Wow. Maybe it's a little far-fetched to think that Google would spend $106M to open-source something, but when you think about it many companies have paid more to do the same (or for things that were already open source). Novell paid $210M for SUSE. Sun paid $1B for MySQL. And having the best video codec as a free codec does fit with Google's open strategy.<p>And it might even be cheaper over the long run. Remember, while H.264 is free to broadcast right now, there are fees coming in a year or two just for pushing H.264 over the web. If nothing else, Google's ownership of On2 provides a hedge against getting hit too hard by royalties.
This is an excellent strategic move by Google and further evidence to the notion that Google is trying to marginalize the various core elements of the Internet experience (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=693861" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=693861</a>). If they open up VP8 and have it become the default built-in video codec for HTML5 browsers, it puts a lot pressure on Apple and Microsoft and even Adobe. At the price they paid, it was definitely a great deal for them.
A reddit comment on this purchase says this:<p><pre><code> Google tends to look a few steps ahead.
Remember that whole debacle with GOOG-411
and speech recognition? They intend to use
the free GOOG-411 service to improve their
speech recognition so that YouTube videos
can eventually have automatic closed captioning,
and can -- in turn -- be searchable by Google
and can offer a whole new era of video search
results.
</code></pre>
The automatic closed captioning is especially interesting. Any truth to it?<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/97rc8/if_youtube_is_causing_google_to_lose_millions_a/c0bpz24" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/97rc8/if_youtube...</a>
worst case scenario: One more codec we have to encode videos in if they were to be supported by the <video>-tag: Safari uses h.264, Mozilla uses Theora and Chrome now uses any of the newly acquired codecs to save on h.264 license fees.<p>Before this, we just had h.264 and Theora.<p>Better scenario: Google opensources some or all of the acquired codecs and gives a free patent license (I don't think they can give the patents away to public domain, can they?) at which time, we'll have Safari on one side and Chrome / Mozilla on the other which basically is the same as we had today, but reversed.<p>Best-case scenario: As above, but the HTML5-guys agree to actually mandate the use of one of these new codecs forcing compliant browsers (this then may include Safari) to implement them and thus we only need to encode the video once (assuming youtube supports the new codec aswell, because we'll need to still fall back to youtube for IE).<p>Or anything in between.<p>Just don't get your hopes up.