Google Buys On2: The Latest Front In The War Against Adobe, Apple, Microsoft And Mozilla's Firefox, For You

My interest was piqued this morning when I saw a TechCrunch alert (followed shortly thereafter by writeups from other folks; Om Malik, The Register, etc) that Google has just acquired On2 Technologies. On2, formerly known as the Duck Corporation, is the developer of the VP series of TrueMotion video codecs, which long-time readers know I’ve written about many times before. And my angle on this acquisition is one that no other commentator I’ve yet seen has taken: following in the footsteps of the Chrome web browser and the Android and Chrome O/S operating systems, Google’s pending direct control over On2 is the company’s latest move to wrest control of the Web from companies such as Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla (specifically, the latter’s under-siege Firefox web browser).

The bulk of today’s rich browser-based applications are crafted using Adobe’s Flash and Shockwave toolsets (via Adobe’s prior acquisition of Macromedia), slowly expanding to standalone capabilities via AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). Microsoft’s belated but determined competitive offering is called Silverlight, and then there’s also Sun’s (soon Oracle’s) Java and a few other lesser entities. And for video-centric web delivery, other ‘wrapper’ formats include Apple QuickTime, DivX and RealVideo. Historically (as I discussed in detail back in April), Flash employed On2’s VP6 codec, but Adobe is migrating to industry-standard H.264. ABC uses the more advanced VP7 codec in its proprietary browser-based player. Silverlight was originally a WMV (i.e. VC-1)-centric offering, but has become more codec-agnostic in newer iterations. QuickTime historically leveraged a Sorenson-developed codec but is also increasingly focused on H.264. And DivX relies on a H.264 predecessor, MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile.

This clutter of codecs (and player apps that handle them) is a frustrating nightmare for content developers and consumers alike, along with being a lingering de facto standard ‘lock’ for first-mover Adobe/Macromedia that leaves some browsers, operating systems and hardware platforms at a competitive content-access disadvantage. So it is that the <video> tag built into HTML v5 (which is already supported in Firefox v3.5), whose development was co-managed by Google employee Ian Hickson, enables browser-based video decoding. A corresponding <audio> tag enables native audio processing. And what default codecs are specified in HTML 5? Aye, there’s the rub.

There’s general agreement on the use of Ogg Vorbis as the audio codec. The main problem with this open-source candidate, though, is that it has yet to stand up to intense patent-infringement scrutiny, thereby making folks nervous about using it (thereby exposing themselves to potential lawsuits). Video is even more contentious (in part, due to the same IP-infringing worries); some of the key players prefer Ogg Theora, while others lean towards H.264. As Slashdot recently noted:

Apple, for its part, won’t support Ogg Theora in QuickTime [editor note: and the Safari browser], expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free. Opera and Mozilla oppose using H.264 due to licensing and distribution issues. Google has similar reservations, despite already using H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. Microsoft has made no commitment to support <video>.

And Google’s YouTube division recently expressed additional reservations about Ogg Theora as compared to Flash/H.264, related to the bit rate (therefore also storage capacity) required to deliver a given level of image quality:

Comparing DailyMotion to YouTube is disingenuous. If [YouTube] were to switch to Theora and maintain even a semblance of the current YouTube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the Internet. The most recent public number was just over 1 billion video streams a day, and I’ve seen what we’ve had to do to make that happen, and it is a staggering amount of bandwidth. DailyMotion is a fine site, but they’re just not YouTube.

But here’s the twist: Ogg Theora is based on VP3, which On2 handed over to the open source community several years ago. If Google were able to use On2’s staff to further improve Ogg Theora in a backwards-compatible bitstream manner, that’d help address YouTube’s concerns. Or maybe Google will open-source latest-generation VP8, which On2 claimed was far more competitive with H.264, in a bid to make it the web video standard. Regardless, ownership of On2 gives Google better control of Ogg Theora from an IP standpoint. And On2 also recently obtained H.264 capabilities, too, via its May, 2007 acquisition of Hantro Products. Put the pieces together, mix them with the ever-maturing Chrome browser, various Google Apps’ offline Gears capabilities and even the ability to execute processor-native code within the browser, and I see yet another way for the company to further clarify its vision statement:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

What do you see?

Followup: If you’re running the latest version of the Chrome, Firefox, Opera and/or Safari browser, head here for a demonstration of HTML v5’s potential. And here’s a Flash-less demo on YouTube’s site, coded in HTML v5.