The future of video codecs will be decided by Google!?!

Internet company Google uses crisis time to expand its influence by buying smaller firms. Google’s latest purchase, On2, is particularly successful: it will not only reduce costs, but will also be a strong argument for the future of online video.

Time for shopping is appropriate: the revenue from the sale of Google contextual advertising continues to grow (albeit not as fast as before), and the cost of most other companies is seriously reduced. The last purchase, which was agreed to Google, the company On2 Technologies. This company has long been engaged in the development of video compression technology. The company has created video codecs such as VP3, VP4, VP5, TrueMotion VP6, TrueMotion VP7 and VP8. On2 customers already include Nokia, Skype, Adobe, and others.
')
Each share, according to the terms of the agreement, cost Sergey Brin the company 60 cents, and the whole On2 Technologies - $ 106.5 million. This is 57% more than the company's current market capitalization. It is worth noting that for Google this is the first purchase of an asset whose shares are listed on the stock exchange. According to TechCrunch, at the peak of its development, On2 Technologies (this happened in 1999, just before the famous “crash” of dot-com), the company's capitalization was about $ 1 billion. Even before entering the public market, On2 received $ 6.5 million investment from venture capital funds Edelson Technology Partners and Citigroup Ventures. The deal formally still has to be approved by the board of directors of On2, as well as by the US antitrust authorities. Experts believe that problems should arise. Google itself promises to complete the acquisition process by the fourth quarter of 2009.

Why did Google need a video codec company? “Video on the Internet occupies more and more space. We are confident that in the long term, it is the video that will become the engine of the Network. Therefore, it seems to us that high-quality video and technology for its compression will soon become part of any web-oriented platform, ”explained company Vice President Sundar Pichai at length.

Experts link the purchase of a new company with three factors at once. First, the video codecs of the new company will be needed to improve the YouTube video service. Secondly, video playback technologies on mobile devices are important for Android: devices based on this operating system can be positioned as multimedia. And finally, thirdly, Google is currently working on its own operating system for Chrome OS personal computers. And her video capabilities are also needed. At Google itself, they refrain from commenting on this issue and promise that they will tell what they will do with the new company only when the acquisition process is fully completed.

Video codecs are a very important technology for the modern Internet. It is video encoding algorithms that are responsible for how, with what efficiency and with what losses the video will be transmitted to the user. Since VideoCD, which worked on the MPEG-1 codec, in the field of consumer electronics and on the Internet, a zoo of video coding technologies has been divorced: DVD (MPEG-2), Blu-ray (MPEG-4), and also QuickTime, Windows Media Video, Ogg Theora, H.264 and many others. The most popular Flash video on the network today is running on the On2 codec from the On2 company, providing a high level of image compression without significant loss of quality and thereby reducing the load on servers broadcasting videos. Famous in narrow circles On2 not only that. At one time, she released the VP3 codec to "freedom", and on its basis, the community of programmers who prefer open source software created the popular Ogg Theora codec in this area.

In the purchase of On2, there is another very important point: the acquisition of Google codec developers for online video can significantly affect the struggle of browser manufacturers around the future HTML5 web standard. Although the official approval of the new standard is a matter of a distant future, the battles around it are already serious.

In the specifications of the future language of web pages there is a simple tag, the processing of which by web browsers will be responsible for displaying the video to the user, similar to the way the tag that displays images now works. This will greatly facilitate the work of web developers who are now forced to write special code to insert video players on the pages of sites. The problem, however, is what kind of video codec future browsers will use to process the video.

Apple and Google with their browsers Safari and Chrome preferred to see in this place an effective H.264 codec, which they are now actively using. Mozilla, with its Firefox and Opera, insisted on using the free Ogg Theora codec, unlike H.264.

Buying On2, Google not only acquires the latest development of the company, the VP8 codec, which, according to On2, is 40% more efficient than another popular codec, H.264. Obviously, Google uses it to further develop YouTube and reduce its costs. However, Google can go further, for example, by transferring it to the category of free software. In this case, V8 will have every chance of becoming the dominant codec, and Google will have to change the balance of power in the dispute over the basic video codec for the future network and become a trendsetter in the field of online video.

via adindex.ru
and another useful link