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http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1375034#post1375034 http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1375034#post1375034 Seems (according to one, at least) many

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1375034#post1375034 http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1375034#post1375034 Seems (according to one, at least) many shareholders were against the merger, but the corporate leadership managed to push it through.

wmf 17y ago
Considering Flash's migration from VP6 to H.264, the glut of codecs on the market, and the fact that VP8 is neither open nor standard, Google's $100M+ offer seems quite generous.
- pavs 17y ago
  You know I have absolutely no knowledge about how codec licensing works so please feel free to inform me. I am wondering how much Google pays for codec license for Youtube/Google-video. Is it possible that that Google will benefit from this merger by pushing VP8 (assuming thats their best/latest codec) as a standard and open codec as an alternative to Theora. Not sure if I am comparing apple to oranges so feel free to correct me.
  - DarkShikari 17y ago
    I am wondering how much Google pays for codec license for Youtube/Google-video. Zero. Internet broadcast is free until at least 2016. They might pay a per-encoder fee on the server-side, but this is likely negligible (20 cents each). Now, the fees they pay for Chrome may be significant, though we don't know if they negotiated a better deal than the publicly available license. If I recall correctly, the license cap is around $4m/year for H.264.
    - wmf 17y ago
      Google ought to be paying for H.264 encoder licenses for YouTube, although maybe they don't have to pay anything if they have fewer than 10,000 encoding machines. Certainly it's far less than $100M.
    - kierank 17y ago
      Now, the fees they pay for Chrome may be significant, though we don't know if they negotiated a better deal than the publicly available license. Doesn't the RAND (Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) nature of H.264 licensing make this impossible?
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  I completely agree--at least from my perspective, On2 is completely worthless except for their patents. I find this purchase particularly interesting as Google is often noted for buying companies solely for their employees. 1. They're currently in the red. 2. VP6, their only successful product in recent years, is obsolete. 3. Neither VP7 nor VP8 is competitive with the best H.264 encoders, nor do they have the clout to get hardware implementations out there. They will serve--at best--as niche formats, like Bink. VP7 got practically no adoption--the only notable licensee I know of is Skype video chat. As VP8 is basically just a faster, pared-down VP7, I doubt it will do much more for them. Most importantly, proprietary video and audio formats are simply hard to pitch nowadays. Nobody wants to use file formats that depend entirely on the implementations and support of a single company; it's simply too risky. The only proprietary format I can think of that still has wide adoption for reasons other than legacy is Bink, due to the low licensing costs, good reputation, top-quality tools, and cross-platform availability. And, of course, the fact that games are usually release-once-and-forget products, maybe with a few bugfix patches on the side. (Note "professional" video and audio stuff is its own world, and has a huge variety of almost-entirely-proprietary stuff, like ProRes, etc.) 4. Their last code release, VP3, while quite outdated, is a great example of utterly atrocious code, which doesn't say much for the quality of the rest of their code, or the capability of their programmers. I found the fact that their shareholders asked for more utterly hilarious.
  - zokier 17y ago
    On2 has also some hardware implementations of video codecs, ie 1080p h264 hardware codec
  - lambda 17y ago
    Well, it sounds like a lot of those shareholders bought shares back when VP6 was the only game in town for Flash, and Flash video popularity was skyrocketing. They've already lost money, but since the knew that Google really wanted to buy and has big coffers, held out for more to reduce their losses. Now, what's Google going to do with them? That's an excellent question. VP3 was adapted to create Ogg Theora. Google has committed pretty strongly to supporting HTML5 and open standards for the HTML; they support both Ogg Theora and H.264 in Chrome, and serve up H.264 on YouTube. There isn't, however, a viable cross browser codec as Mozilla and Opera refuse to support H.264 and Apple and Nokia refuse to support Ogg Theora (and Google won't host video in Theora, as the video is too big at acceptable quality levels). So, I'm wondering if Google is planning on making VP6, 7, or 8 an open standard, freely licensed unlike H.264 so it could actually be viable cross browser. It's still an uphill battle, as you don't have hardware support yet, and need to convince the other browser vendors to go along, and it's a lot of money to spend to just give away for free. On the other hand, Google really does seem to believe in promoting open standards, and has been spending a lot of money on free software supporting open standards, such as Chrome, and as you point out, it's tough to make money on proprietary codecs by now, so I'm really quite interested to see what happens here.

wmf 17y ago

Considering Flash's migration from VP6 to H.264, the glut of codecs on the market, and the fact that VP8 is neither open nor standard, Google's $100M+ offer seems quite generous.

pavs 17y ago
You know I have absolutely no knowledge about how codec licensing works so please feel free to inform me. I am wondering how much Google pays for codec license for Youtube/Google-video. Is it possible that that Google will benefit from this merger by pushing VP8 (assuming thats their best/latest codec) as a standard and open codec as an alternative to Theora. Not sure if I am comparing apple to oranges so feel free to correct me.
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  I am wondering how much Google pays for codec license for Youtube/Google-video. Zero. Internet broadcast is free until at least 2016. They might pay a per-encoder fee on the server-side, but this is likely negligible (20 cents each). Now, the fees they pay for Chrome may be significant, though we don't know if they negotiated a better deal than the publicly available license. If I recall correctly, the license cap is around $4m/year for H.264.
  - wmf 17y ago
    Google ought to be paying for H.264 encoder licenses for YouTube, although maybe they don't have to pay anything if they have fewer than 10,000 encoding machines. Certainly it's far less than $100M.
  - kierank 17y ago
    Now, the fees they pay for Chrome may be significant, though we don't know if they negotiated a better deal than the publicly available license. Doesn't the RAND (Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) nature of H.264 licensing make this impossible?
DarkShikari 17y ago
I completely agree--at least from my perspective, On2 is completely worthless except for their patents. I find this purchase particularly interesting as Google is often noted for buying companies solely for their employees. 1. They're currently in the red. 2. VP6, their only successful product in recent years, is obsolete. 3. Neither VP7 nor VP8 is competitive with the best H.264 encoders, nor do they have the clout to get hardware implementations out there. They will serve--at best--as niche formats, like Bink. VP7 got practically no adoption--the only notable licensee I know of is Skype video chat. As VP8 is basically just a faster, pared-down VP7, I doubt it will do much more for them. Most importantly, proprietary video and audio formats are simply hard to pitch nowadays. Nobody wants to use file formats that depend entirely on the implementations and support of a single company; it's simply too risky. The only proprietary format I can think of that still has wide adoption for reasons other than legacy is Bink, due to the low licensing costs, good reputation, top-quality tools, and cross-platform availability. And, of course, the fact that games are usually release-once-and-forget products, maybe with a few bugfix patches on the side. (Note "professional" video and audio stuff is its own world, and has a huge variety of almost-entirely-proprietary stuff, like ProRes, etc.) 4. Their last code release, VP3, while quite outdated, is a great example of utterly atrocious code, which doesn't say much for the quality of the rest of their code, or the capability of their programmers. I found the fact that their shareholders asked for more utterly hilarious.
- zokier 17y ago
  On2 has also some hardware implementations of video codecs, ie 1080p h264 hardware codec
- lambda 17y ago
  Well, it sounds like a lot of those shareholders bought shares back when VP6 was the only game in town for Flash, and Flash video popularity was skyrocketing. They've already lost money, but since the knew that Google really wanted to buy and has big coffers, held out for more to reduce their losses. Now, what's Google going to do with them? That's an excellent question. VP3 was adapted to create Ogg Theora. Google has committed pretty strongly to supporting HTML5 and open standards for the HTML; they support both Ogg Theora and H.264 in Chrome, and serve up H.264 on YouTube. There isn't, however, a viable cross browser codec as Mozilla and Opera refuse to support H.264 and Apple and Nokia refuse to support Ogg Theora (and Google won't host video in Theora, as the video is too big at acceptable quality levels). So, I'm wondering if Google is planning on making VP6, 7, or 8 an open standard, freely licensed unlike H.264 so it could actually be viable cross browser. It's still an uphill battle, as you don't have hardware support yet, and need to convince the other browser vendors to go along, and it's a lot of money to spend to just give away for free. On the other hand, Google really does seem to believe in promoting open standards, and has been spending a lot of money on free software supporting open standards, such as Chrome, and as you point out, it's tough to make money on proprietary codecs by now, so I'm really quite interested to see what happens here.