OT: Google buys ON2

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This is MAJOR news for me. It can alter entire road maps for someone who does compression. Probably should be in the compression forum.

Will Google kill the On2VP licensing fee (seems no one talks about THAT cost) that makes all compression apps more expensive and why shareware generally excludes its use?
If they do that, will this mean the improved version beyond VP6 (VP7, VP8) get implemented with their noteworthy quality and efficiency improvements?
Is there any plan that might encourage smart phone adaption?

We can't answer those and neither has Google. It's going to be a tough road if they're hoping for competitive adoption as things move to H.264 which is supported in Quicktime, Flash, Silverlight and, in it's Baseline form, on iPhones, etc.

Still some fire in the pan? It is quite surprising. As I thought they were almost phasing out, when everything started adopting the H.264 standard. I just hope they don't end up dividing the market. Google owns Youtube too.



www.strypesinpost.com

I'm concerned about the Google YouTube connection as well. If they shifted to On2 that could mean dropping iPhone support. Of course we've seen how Google's relationship to Apple has changed recently.

Maybe with HTML 5 the ground may shift in uncertain directions. It will take a couple of years at least for players/browser player plugins to drop away. That might make the need for an "it" codec less important. I'm trying to kick start my crystal ball (or is it my 8 ball).

Not having a standard paves the way for... Broadcast TV. I'm quite interested in the whole internet thing, how it will turn out, and how, if anyone will be able to find a way to make revenue like broadcast tv, or will it be just Google owning everything. But we're very iffy on web standards, which leads to broadcast tv being the path of least resistance to reach the widest possible market. Then again, where I am, homes may be wired with gigabit internet connection. Heck, if it's consistent, you could stream Blu-Ray over that or live DV capture over the internet... Very interesting, how this will all turn out. It really seems like Google is going on the right path on this.



www.strypesinpost.com

A major store and forward (and live streaming) company for News delivery (Quicklink) has for the longest time been PC only and over the last few years have been using vp7 for its compression. Recently they have developed and delivered a Mac version of their store and forward client software, however the Mac version uses h.264 compression. They've also released a new and far superior live streaming client (for Windows only) ... which also now uses h.264 compression as standard. I've not seen any vp8 footage to compare, but certainly the h.264 compressions I've seen have compared very favorably against the vp7 compressions of the same.