My immediate first thought was also that Ogg Theora & HTML5 played a role in Google's reasoning to buy On2. Even if they've disclaimed all patent rights, Google is providing the deep pockets to keep other vendors reassured about patent trolls.
This decision doesn't make any sense to me. There's nothing about On2 that's worth more than ~$10m.<p>On2 is notorious for having fallen behind technology-wise, with VP7 falling by the wayside and VP8 seemingly being just a small upgrade of VP7--and still being vastly inferior to the best free software encoders out there. They've pretty much had to cheat in every single comparison they've posted in order to make it look as if they were still in the game.<p>They've spent the past <i>seven years</i> saying that they were "about to" come out with something better than H.264, and yet still haven't; they're almost Duke Nukem Forever-level in terms of vaporware.<p>A developer I know joked that their entire development team is probably worth less than Skal (former Xvid developer who currently works for Google).<p>Furthermore, nobody is going to buy into a new video format--even on the phenomenally unlikely chance that it's marginally better--if no hardware supports it.<p>The only thing I can imagine is that they bought them for their software patents, which says something about the sad state of the intellectual property world.
So are they going to license VP8 for money or open it? Android and possibly HTML5 could stand to gain a lot from this, I guess. [VP8 was touted as better-performing than H.264, with suitability still for low power (eg ARM) platforms... though haven't seen any results yet]
Wow Google makes $106 million in about 43 hours. If this is accurate <a href="http://www.incomediary.com/top-earning-websites/" rel="nofollow">http://www.incomediary.com/top-earning-websites/</a> google makes almost 700 dollars per second.
Maybe this means they'll open up some of their windows-only codecs for us.<p>I downloaded some content recently that was VP8 encoded. Came with instructions to download a codec.. which is Windows XP and higher only.<p>Not even VLC can play that.