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Google Acquiring VP3 Developer On2 Technologies
R.Mo_Robert writes "BetaNews is reporting that Google is acquiring On2, the video codec company and original developers of the VP3 codec from which Theora is derived. The article suggests that this may mean Google is backing Ogg Theora as the HTML5 video standard, but this is likely not the case--with Theora already being open-source and On2 having disclaimed all rights and patents, there is no reason Google should have needed to do this to push Theora. You may recall from some time back that HTML5 no longer specifies which video codec(s) a browser should support due to there being, unfortunately, no suitable codec at this time. But Google (known for supporting H.264) practically owns Web video with YouTube in most people's minds, so their influence could really swing the future of HTML5 video either way. It remains to be seen whether Google's acquisition of On2 has any bearing on their plans for video on the Web."
Theora was based on one of On2's earliest codecs. VP6 & VP7 have been far more successful and are even used as the Flash video codecs. If Google is acquiring On2, it could mean that they're looking to open up the formats that have defined Flash as the media player of choice.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
So can we speculate the reason for Google's action? Let's speculate. I'd like to see what is on minds of slashdotters.
So now Chrome can support only VP6/7 in die tag, Apple does it's quicktime thing, MS does .wmv and Firefox OGG. Hooray!
Honestly, i don't think that would happen, i hope that it may be open sourced and that Android will get some "high quality" video stuff (as far as you can get that on mobile displays).
But Google (known for supporting H.264) practically owns Web video with YouTube in most people's minds, so their influence could really swing the future of HTML5 video either way.
I'm not so sure. I doubt the vast majority of people who believe Internet Explorer to be the internet noticed that there was some kind of takeover. YouTube owns web video in most people's minds, yes, but it was difficult to tell anything happened even for those who did know what was going on. Even now, the bottom of the page says "© 2009 YouTube, LLC." Either way, I'm waiting for the day when YouTube uses the tag for displaying media and I can finally forget about FLV forever. Long time coming.
For $100 million dollars? That's what Google paid for On2. Why not just poach the people directly and let On2 die? That would be a lot cheaper for Google.
But that would be evil.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Google has a lot to gain by upgrading or replacing Ogg Theora in order to create a codec which is suitable as a web standard. The biggest item which could get in the way of Android taking off is proprietary video embedding using Flash and (especially) Silverlight.
I hope they pour huge resources into the development of such a standard, and release it as open source. This would not be out of character for Google, based on what they did with Chrome. It would be a benefit for end users, and a competitive gain for Google.
Google is starting to remind me of Cisco.
For years, Cisco innovated, created, well, MADE really cool things.
Now, they just buy them. I see Google heading that route.
(cue someone saying that Google still innovates, etc. Yeah, I know. So does Cisco. But all their major stuff in the past, oh, I dunno, 5 years at least, has been purchases of other companies making cool stuff.)
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That's a bit misleading. There are several suitable codecs. The problem is the major players involved with their "Not Invented Here" mentalities.
When I was researching creating my own video upload site I contacted On2 for information about licensing their flash video encoder. They claimed that "All major user submitted flash websites used their encoder", I assumed they were hinting at YouTube. Knowing this, an acquisition seems like a smart decision.
They're already buying the milk. Might as well just pay for the cow.
1. They're getting a good patent portfolio that they can use to defend their investment in YouTube with. They're fairly heavily invested in using ffmpeg which may have patent issues.
2. They're getting some very smart people and a user base that they can use to help steer the direction of video they way they want it to go.
3. VP7's being used for video chat by Skype and AIM - they might find it useful for their expanding telecommunications offerings.
The non-evil, best way to acquire this talent is to buy the company. Sometimes this is not possible because the company has many other assets which make it expensive. This should not be the case with On2.
Also, maybe the original investors in On2 were smart enough to put non-compete clauses in the contracts of the engineers they hired for their start-up. After all, when you invest millions of dollars in a start-up, you usually want to protect your investment.
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
VP8 was designed to deal with ARM chips and we know that Google Chrome OS will run on ARM chips. Why isn't this being connected in reports? Tech journalists are incompetent.
Actually they have vp6 and vp8 http://www.on2.com/index.php?564 which -- surprise, surprise -- on2 claims is better than h.264 -- if google decides to open up vp8 -- it would change the equation radically. Particularly the ogg/vp8 combo. It's also possible some vp3 diffs (theora) would still be useful when applied to vp8 -- although what the chances of this are, I couldn't say. It does solve the h.264 patent license problem for google with android and chrome os. A theora / vp8 release and a move to primacy of vp8 or derivative for youtube would reshape the whole playing field. I'm hopeful, but not gleeful yet.
As a developer using FFmpeg, I run into problems with our clients trying to encode / decode VP6 and VP7. I'm hoping that Google will subsequently offer open source implementations of these. It will make my life a whole lot easier.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
YouTube still loses money hand over fist, where as Hulu is growing in revenue and popularity.
It is extremely easy to rip videos from YouTube, which might be a sticking point in YouTube getting more mainstream/commercial content. Frankly, I don't want to see adds for lame user-generated content on YouTube. And I do find most YouTube content lacking. But at the end of the day, if both YouTube and Hulu had say, full Simpsons episodes, I'd rather support Google's site rather than NBC's site.
These developers could perhaps tweak their existing code to develop a closed, DRM-laden codec that would allow YouTube to stream commercial content. And if YouTube doesn't make a move like this, it may just continue to hemorrhage money from here to eternity.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
But lot's of media oriented ARM platform already got h264 (and other) hardware accelerator...
It will be difficult to beat them with pure software.
Google can now use On2 codecs such as VP8 in YouTube, for free. No more royalties. But the royalties are not that expensive so this isn't likely a big deal for them. (Google could save more money by using smarter settings on their H.264 encoder.)
Do you think Google will seriously try to make money by selling codecs? I don't. $100 million is small change to Google, and if that's all it cost to buy On2, then the On2 revenue stream must be trivial by Google's standards.
So, Google won't save much money and won't make much money by buying On2. I think they are up to something else.
What I think is more interesting is the possibility that Google will give On2's latest technology to the Theora guys. Just as Sun started giving away OpenOffice.org after buying StarOffice, it's likely that Google will give away some or all of the On2 technology.
Despite being based on technology that is nearly a decade old, Theora is already fairly competitive for web video. (Theora is better than H.263, which has actually been used for years, so it's difficult to argue that Theora is not usable for web video.) Now imagine that Theora gets the best technology bits from a modern On2 codec, and integrates those, such that Theora really is as good as H.264, or even better.
Now imagine that this improved Theora is bundled with Google Chrome and Firefox, bundled with Android, and bundled with Google Chrome OS. Within a few years, Theora could become firmly established everywhere as a baseline standard that anyone can use.
Google likes things that make it easier for Google's customers to use Google's services. They like their customers not being locked into proprietary technologies not owned by Google. It will be impossible for Google to take the market away from H.264, but it is very possible that they could make sure their customers can always easily access their services.
Note that this scenario utterly depends on the new Theora being free software. Google could try to sell a proprietary On2 codec and gain a significant market share; well, if they try it, all I can say is "good luck with that." It's hard to push out an established standard; to do it, you need to be significantly better, not just a little bit better. Better technology, with Google behind it, completely free (and with no need to even keep track of how many codecs you ship out) might succeed.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Because they probably also want On2's patent portfolio and trade secrets as well as the people.
Yeah, it's likely that they want the company's IP, too. Go back and look at the whole HTML 5 and Theora debate. Apparently Google is paying some kind of licensing fee for h264 for both YouTube and Chrome, probably for Android and ChromeOS too if they're providing support. Theora is an open source version of On2's codec that is both old and doesn't have any hardware support.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to guess that Google wants to open up On2's most recent codecs and try to push other companies to support it. That way they could use the same video formats for all their products without paying additional licensing fees. Plus, they can move YouTube to using HTML5's "video" tag without having to keep a Theora copy to support Firefox/Linux and a h264 copy to support Safari/iPods/iPhones/AppleTVs. Think of what they'll save on transcoding and storage.
How is a company that makes video codecs worth $106.5 M? I for one am very confused.
And for God's sake please give me a Slashdot 1.0 theme! I can't take this JavaScript-laden hell.
That's a bonus. They want the IP. YouTube lives or dies by Adobe Flash. They want a codec that is as efficient as H.264 that they can open source and get into HTML5. Google says Theora isn't; apparently they think VP8 is. Then they can start pushing people towards HTML5 browsers. I bet they could get a lot of YouTube visitors to upgrade if it meant they could watch clips in HD versus the quality you see now with Flash.
If we're being pedantic, OGG is just a container and as such not interesting. Although opensourcing VP8 may halt work on Theora, Vorbis is going nowhere, as it's considered among the best audo codecs out there, if not the best.
Actually, many of those ARM Media-Oriented SoC's (Read: anything from TI, Qualcomm, NVidia, etc...) actually have media DSPs and they're doing the h.264 decode with the DSP core instead of dedicated hardware...
In any case where you see one of the new ARM Cortex-A8/A9 based media chips, you'll be able to implement h.264 or VP3-VP8 in the system with relative ease. Including the iPhone...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
106.5 million? Look how little that is compared to the amount of money they'd lose, licensing H.264!
VP8 should give similar results to H.264 as used on Youtube. (Lots of quality enhancing features turned off to speed up encoding)
such that Theora really is as good as H.264, or even better.
H.264 has a major advantage - implementation in silicon (hardware acceleration).
Google owning On2, and convincing vendors that YouTube on GoogleOS on Google Devices is going to need silicon, providing purchasing commitments, and having the team onboard that knows how to do things like re-write the codec for devices without FPU's can create the necessary momentum to bury the MPEGLA. Steve Jobs did us a short-term favor a few years back on h.264, but the non-free aspect of that is turning around to bite us now.
I'm working on a project that could really use hw-accelerated free codecs and the current tech is a patent minefield developers are afraid to step into. Send me a beta test unit, OK guys?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
As a developer, I can say that Google's product suite is unsettlingly dynamic. There's a new API every week or so, and no asssurance of futures. For example, I was all excited about using Google's JS extensions (with the ability to load/save data locally) but I've yet to see this working anywhere but Windows. Chrome is nice but Windows only, there's now (finally!) a Linux version, but it's so buggy that it often crashes X windows. And now they have their own O/S!? Two?! But which one should I use?
It's a mish-mash of poorly integrated pieces, and while they are doing some cool stuff, I need a bit more stability and completeness to do much with them. See, when I write software, the software becomes infrastructure for my clients. They use and depend on my software. I have hosting contracts for PHP apps I wrote 10 years ago, and the fact that the PHP guys have done so well at backwards compatibility means that I've transitioned from PHP 3 to 4 to 5 with so little porting that I didn't even charge the end users for the effort!
I can't spend weeks/months working on software with a platform that's 'cool' but won't be supported in a year or two!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
There was no codec that was suitable to all the needs of the major browser developers. Having to pay royalties was an impossibility for Mozilla and Opera, and thus made H.264 (or any of the official MPEG codecs) unsuitable for them. Apple's concern about submarine patents on Theora technology was legitimate, as was the lack of hardware implementation (although that would've been resolved in time). Furthermore, Google's concerns about quality were legitimate if the goal is to move things forward beyond the crap that YouTube currently serves, rather than being content to be almost as good as the worst H.264 implementation available (the Flash implementation). Dirac is in an even worse position, and it processing requirements would be very undesirable for handheld devices.
So all but one (Theora) were absolutely not suitable for implementation by the browsers, and even that one was questionable. I don't know if VP8 will be any better - it's technology seems to be much more similar to the modern MPEG codecs than Theora, which makes me think that On2 is probably cross-licensing patents which Google will not be able to open up, but I may be wrong.
Personally, I would have spent my money on at least Onlogn stuff.
No, I didn't read the summary, what of it?
... and they no longer have to pay a fee to On2 for each encoded video if what I hear (that they licensed some custom servers made by On2 for processing videos) is true
YouTube lives or dies by Adobe Flash. They want a codec that is as efficient as H.264 that they can open source and get into HTML5. Google says Theora isn't; apparently they think VP8 is.
Except the only reason VP3/Theora is relatively patent-safe is that it's a design mostly based on ideas that date back to the earliest video codecs. I'm not convinced that any newer codec would have the same guarantees; modern codec designers seem to quite like copying bits of h.264 (Real are, IIRC, particularly fond of this).
Todd,
Why is buying the company less evil than just hiring the people that work there?
Have you ever been a hiring manager?
I have not been a hiring manager, but I have worked with many people who have been. Although, I think this is more of a topic for HR and company lawyers.
Engineers are considered (or at least they were at one time) an asset, and companies protect this asset in several ways:
1. They restrict people from working for a direct competitor for some period of time after leaving a company.
2. They restrict people from hiring co-workers away from a company from which they have recently left.
3. Leaking information about the people who work for a company can be grounds for termination.
If you are unfamiliar with these issues, perhaps you have never been in a position which makes you not easily replaceable. Some of the least replaceable people are analog and VLSI circuit designers (which I am not).
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
Todd,
Non-compete clauses are not legally enforceable in the State of California.
Given that fact, please explain why the world changing success of 'Silicon Valley' happened and is still happening in California? Google, Apple, EBay, etc, all seem to be doing just fine without the Non-complete clauses that you refer to.
You are correct. I guess when professors I know at a top-10 school are not allowed to consult for company B because they have consulted for company A in the past, this is not related.
Also, when Intel goes to court to keep one of their engineers from working for AMD, this is not related.
I believe IBM often participates in this sort of court battle.
But, all of this is off topic. If you want to get a team that works on a certain type of technology and does it well, the best way is to find a team that has been doing it. Hiring that entire team away from a company without the companies blessing may be legal, but it is not the sort of thing that wins praise outside of the boardroom or a shareholder's meeting.
Purchasing a company outright is the best way to take control of the technology and get a set of already-trained engineers.
Perhaps someone who knows someone at Google or On2 can confirm whether or not Google wanted the engineers or just the IP. Then we can quit arguing about this issue.
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
Not to mention, when you get the company, you get all of the code that the people have been working on. Even without non-compete clauses, it's very difficult legally to get people to work on a very similar product because they can easily write something derived from code that they did as work-for-hire at their previous job, opening you up to lawsuits for copyright infringement. If you're in the USA, their former employer may also have files patents relating to the stuff they were working on. By buying the company, you get the code, the patents, and the people. The people are the most important part, but with the code and the patents they can immediately start working at full speed, while without them they may need to spend a long time working around and duplicating old code.
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Todd poaching people to come work at a company is mutually agreed to by both the hiring company and the the employee. Every participant in the transaction can enter into the transaction or not according to their free will. Why do you persist in maligning that? Should you or I be slaves to the first company that employs us?
I was suggesting in the previous articles that Google, Apple, and Mozilla corp should jointly approach the MPEG-LA and offer to buy the H.264 patents outright. Buying On2 is probably cheaper, however I wouldn't be surprised if their newer codecs contain algorithms that other people have patented (e.g. Microsoft) which are covered by cross-licensing deals. This would make it impossible for Mozilla to support them, but still make it possible for Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
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Yes. If I am an expert in branch prediction and I work for Intel on their branch predictor (which was one of their most-guarded secrets when I worked for Intel Labs), then if AMD hires me, I am going to have a hard time working on AMD's branch predictor.
Now, if AMD wants to hire me to work on something different from branch prediction, fine.
I do not think Google is going to ask the On2 engineers to work on anything other than CODECs, as least at first.
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
If Google are smart, they will open up VP8 and create a new format with OGG container, VP8 video and Vorbis audio. And then use it for YouTube and in Chrome (I dont know how much it costs google to pay royalties on H.264 but it would definatly be more than VP8 would cost them)
Mozilla (FF/SM/etc) would support it if it was free (and if a good decoder was available under a license Mozilla can accept)
Opera would also likely support it if it was free
Microsoft wont be supporting anytime soon (because they want to push Silverlight instead)
And, by using VP8 for YouTube instead of H.264 (which means they dont have to pay any royalties to MPEG LA), Apple and others will be forced to support it.
For the uninformed a quick google on non-compete for the state of California reveals, they are illegal: http://www.google.com/search?q=non-compete+california&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&lr=lang_en
VP3 was open sourced. Google open sourcing VP8 will do NOTHING to obviate Apple's supposed concern with submarine patents. Forming a patent-pool around Theora, or any other codec, would (or at least, should).
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Actually, Apple might well implement Theora, but they are worried about the patent issues. Amongst other things, that the patent agreement from On2 for VP3 might not be watertight. See this post by Apple employee on the Xiph mailing list - it really shows Apple's stance and worries on this issue.
Perhaps "open sourcing" was an imprecise choice of words. Obviously part of that would be royalty-free licensing of the patents on VP8. Presumably Google now owns most or all of those; any they don't they can either acquire or get a license that allows anyone to use it. The point is that Google doesn't care about making money off of licensing the codec; what they want is something open that has virtually no barrier to entry, everyone can use, and is widely available on clients. Just like with browsers and OSes, they view this as the platform for their advertising and they want as many users as possible.
On2 disclaimed their patents to VP3 as well. What I already said continues to apply...
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