Comment by jlouis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlouis | Hacker News Reader

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Google's move is not about "open". The term "open" here is just used as a horse upon which the knight is riding. The long-term ulterior motive is to dominate video on the web.

The h264 removal in Chrome is probably an experiment more than anything else. It will make people remember the h264/WebM debate again, and it will show that Google takes a stance for WebM.

The long term goal is to fragment h264. First move is this. The next move is to play an alliance with Adobe: We can make your Flash survive for 5 more years if you include WebM playback in it. Then you play the piece where you force Apple to adopt WebM by virtue of Youtube: you let it hint that Youtube will in the future only play back WebM. At this point in time, all Android devices have WebM hardware decoding circuits (notice that mobile phones have an incredible short half-life time. You don't see a 3-4 year old mobile phone much these days).

At this point, all of the internet is WebM capable and h264 has been limited to every device which is non-internet. The MPEG-LA consortium will have been marginalized by this time and will have to bite the apple and add in WebM support as well.

/conspiracy

And this is a bad thing?

Let's see, international ITU/ISO standard designed by video professionals (not web search people) vs. WebM de facto "standard" controlled by Google.

I think I know which one the world is behind and which one Google is behind. I vote: world.

I am not particularly on a side here though my bias is that I lean slightly towards WebM.

I think I agree with you, but what does Google stand to gain from controlling the video standard that they don't get from h264?

A couple of things:

First, Google is interested in boosting the web indirectly because it puts their technology (adwords) out there in the right place. If you watched most of your video over WebM over the net, it would indirectly benefit Google. They also know that a large part of their power stems from the fact that they do "nice" things for their users, while their customers pay Google to facilitate a link between googles users and googles customers through adwords. Using their market share for the "greater good" is highly valuable to them in the long term.

Second, if you own the WebM format, you could use it to bully the MPEG-LA members individually. MPEG-LA is an alliance with the sole purpose of keeping everyone else out of the alliance. The patent pool in MPEG-LA is a defensive measure - not an offensive one.

None of the things Google does seem to be short-term invested. It rather looks like they are shooting for 5-10 years ahead.

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