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Google Acquiring VP3 Developer On2 Technologies

Posted by timothy on from the my-crystal-ball-shows-the-web-is-good-for-video dept.

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."

2 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So what is the reason for this? by Neon+Spiral+Injector · · Score: 5, Informative

    No speculation, I submitted this story also, with a quote from Google's Blog:

    Because we spend a lot of time working to make the overall web experience better for users, we think that video compression technology should be a part of the web platform. To that end, we're happy to announce today that we've signed a deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a leading creator of high-quality video compression technology.

    So it doesn't remain to be seen whether Google's acquisition of On2 has any bearing on their plans for video on the Web.

  2. Re:Google probably wants the engineering taltent. by nine-times · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.