CDN Strategy Blog

Yesterday Google announced that they are going to push a new video codec into the market. This year Google bought ON2, a video codec development company. An impressive list of supporting companies was announced as well.

The good news for us and our customers is that we will fully support WebM/VP8 in our software and services.

I have some reservations though…First of all: progressive download only. I’ve seen no demo’s or documentation about live streaming so far. I have not seen initiatives for HTTP streaming. So yes, an interesting alternative for YouTube video, but not for many other applications. It is not going to change things overnight.

Second: where’s the innovation? We’ve seen great open source technologies that rocked the world: Linux. Apache. Mozilla. PHP. We love open source technologies in general. But there are also a lot of open source technologies that just copy existing technology. Office -> OpenOffice is a good example. I don’t see anything new here except for that it is (claimed) open source. I’ve written before: open sourcing is a mean to gain support for the technology and from developers. It is not a goal. Too many times open source technologies are just a blatant rip-off of existing commercial technologies where companies and people put in all their money, sweat, blood and tears.

Third: are WebM and VP8 truly free of any claims? Video codecs are a patent minefield. And so is the WebM container format: it is based on Matroska, which is based on MP4, which is based on Apple’s MOV container. Apple and others have many reasons to consider a patent war here.

Fourth: VP8 is claimed to offer much better quality than H.264. Woops?

Fifth, and that is the most important one for me: end users don’t benefit.

Remember ON2, Sorenson, QuickTime, Real, Windows Media, Flash? End users had to install new players, new runtimes. A pain. Yes, the media player war brought a lot of innovation. But it also delayed the professionalization of an entire new industry.

After 15 years and many media player wars, the media industry finally settled on (at least) the codecs and container part: MP4, H.264, AAC. Industry standards. Adopted standards: all power players including Apple, Microsoft, Google and Adobe adopted. This was a big relief for content owners, service providers and encoding vendors. One source, many distribution options. We were this close to getting a HTML5 standard as well. Yes H.264 is a patent pool. It costs some money. So what. The value of a global standard is huge.

(We actually have a small benefit from lack of standards. We have always followed an all-technologies strategy and that has helped us compete, because by using our technologies, content owners and telcos can distribute content in any format, without becoming dependent on a single technology.)

But you could state that Google and their partners disrespect the importance of an existing standard. By introducing a competing codec and file format, they are starting the media player war all over again. The online community that is so positive about open sourcing and pushing this technology must know that WebM is not a philanthropic gesture by Google. This is all about Google battling aggressively with Apple and Microsoft without bringing anything new or better for end users, who are going to be forced to choose and switch between technologies, again. We are 5 years back in history…

Yet another media technology war – without any true innovation – is directly against the interest of end users.