Google Acquires Video Compression Technology Company On2 For $106 Million | Hacker News Reader

Google Acquires Video Compression Technology Company On2 For $106 Million

techcrunch.com

27 pointsGVRV19 comments

So remember there was a flurry of talk about what was going to kill Flash a few months back?

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.

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.

It's a fairly big move for Linux Multimedia support too.

I don't think this is going to kill flash, or at least not for a while. The speculation that Google is going to switch YouTube over to HTML5 any time soon is quite far fetched. They would be alienating a large part of their user base.

What this does provide is the possibility to have a universally supported HTML5 video codec. At the moment, there isn't a single one that is going to be supported by all browsers. Without a well supported codec, HTML5 video tags are basically useless in production. This new deal doesn't automatically kill flash, but it does somewhat level the playing field between flash and HTML5 in terms of video.

Well, considering bandwidth is more important to google than storage, they could take the more obvious approach and just choose the appropriate method and codec for a person's web browser.

Google is losing the Youtube money on streaming bandwidth. 1+1=2

Youtube already has specialist interfaces for smartphones, iPhones, Big screen TVs, and 6 or 7 different Flash versions based on quality/bitrate, size and codec. They can easily add another using HTML5, particularly if it provides a better experience for those using Google's Chrome browser or OS.

YouTube native on the iPhone was already a major blow to Flash (as was the whole touchscreen phone/computer paradigm). This will kill it (in conjunction with a bunch of other stuff Google is pushing under the umbrella of HTML5).

Video in Flash has always been an aberration created by dodgy patents, licensing considerations and competitive posturing of big companies, now the market can correct itself and Flash (for video and otherwise) is going to have to compete on its own merits. In brief: dead man walking.

I really hope you're right. I would love nothing more than to see flash go the way of .rm

One of On2's codecs, VP6, is already supported out of the box by Flash, potentially allowing them to provide the same video encoding to both HTML5 and Flash visitors.

It's not only about royalty's. For example, Apple happily pays the H264 fees for its iPhones and iPods. Having a free alternative won't make that stop, the reason they use H264 is because there are a lot of hardware acceleration chips out there which they can use.

As long as those aren't available for this new codec (or Ogg for that matter), and they aren't in most of the iPhones / iPods currently out there, Apple won't support this codec.

a) the whole hardware acceleration thing is 99% myth. The core elements of standard video codecs are all accelerated the same way. Apple (ironically) buying a combined hardware/software solution for its devices that it doesn't have the right or the capability to upgrade is a radically different proposition from no acceleration possible/available.

b) Apple was making those statements from a position of strength, they didn't have to be particularly convincing or true to work in that political forum. Though they're still holding a lot of cards, they're much weaker in a world with a technically acceptable, Google-backed, royalty-free codec in the wild. Previously it wasn't in Apple's interests to bother, now things might be different. It's not like Apple owned or controlled H.264 or any other Quicktime codec either.

c) one of the On2 sub-companies that Google just bought (called Hantro) builds video acceleration chips for mobile phones.

I'm not sure (a) is true. I've worked with advanced DSPs, like TI's DM-642. It's popular to do H.264 compression. The hardware acceleration in DSPs like this have nothing do to with H.264 codecs, you're right.

But the software libraries to do the best in class compression are H.264. And I'm not going to write my own compression algorithm. So the choice is lower quality or licensing libraries to take care of the compression.

The software for this DSP would certainly be a hell of a lot cheaper with a Google backed solution. And it might even be free.

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.

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.

One hundred and six million dollars is nothing in this game.

Youtube acquisition price. 1.6 Billion http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15196982/

Youtube estimated daily losses 1.65 Million http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=715&#...;

They could pay that shit off by Thanksgiving if they push a browser plugin out by mid September.

When are people going to stop citing the wildly inaccurate Credit Suisse report? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=573281

Has anybody else noticed a pattern towards more profanity on the site then there used to be? I'm not offended, but I don't really think superfluous curse words really add much to a discussion.

Thing is though that h264 royalties are capped at $5m/year (for next year) http://www.mpegla.com/avc/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf and even that is only in hardware - internet broadcast is license free for another 18 months, and licenses are not allow to grow in cost by more than 10% per 5 year renewal term.

So given that this acquisition is equivalent to ~18 years of h.264 royalties I doubt the motivation is purely financial.

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 (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=693861). 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:

  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.

The automatic closed captioning is especially interesting. Any truth to it?

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/97rc8/if_youtube...

Part of Google Voice is automated transcription of voice mails.

It's still not perfect, but like close captioning and OCR of books, it doesn't have to be 100% to be useful for search purposes.

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.

Before this, we just had h.264 and Theora.

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.

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).

Or anything in between.

Just don't get your hopes up.

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