

Google Buys Video Company On2 for $106.5M - procyon
http://gigaom.com/2009/08/05/google-on2-deal/

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shalmanese
My immediate first thought was also that Ogg Theora & HTML5 played a role in
Google's reasoning to buy On2. Even if they've disclaimed all patent rights,
Google is providing the deep pockets to keep other vendors reassured about
patent trolls.

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andrewf
Even better, Google can now open up VP6.

Vendors have reservations about submarine patents on Theora/VP3 - the
possibility that that even though On2 has disclaimed patent rights, other
patent holders are lurking about, waiting for Theora/VP3 to become popular
enough to sue over.

I think VP6 doesn't have this problem. If a patent troll had a potential claim
over VP6, they'd have gone after On2 or Adobe or Youtube by this point.

EDIT: Someone else has posted that Youtube never used VP6. Anyone know if
Flash+VP6 was common enough to obviate the "we're nervous about patents
because nobody ever used this" argument against Theora/VP3?

~~~
DarkShikari
No need to "open it up"; VP6 has already been reverse-engineered. There were
planned projects to write encoders, but the adding of H.264 support to Adobe
Flash ended any attempt in that realm, since VP6 is now useless.

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DarkShikari
This decision doesn't make any sense to me. There's nothing about On2 that's
worth more than ~$10m.

On2 is notorious for having fallen behind technology-wise, with VP7 falling by
the wayside and VP8 seemingly being just a small upgrade of VP7--and still
being vastly inferior to the best free software encoders out there. They've
pretty much had to cheat in every single comparison they've posted in order to
make it look as if they were still in the game.

They've spent the past _seven years_ saying that they were "about to" come out
with something better than H.264, and yet still haven't; they're almost Duke
Nukem Forever-level in terms of vaporware.

A developer I know joked that their entire development team is probably worth
less than Skal (former Xvid developer who currently works for Google).

Furthermore, nobody is going to buy into a new video format--even on the
phenomenally unlikely chance that it's marginally better--if no hardware
supports it.

The only thing I can imagine is that they bought them for their software
patents, which says something about the sad state of the intellectual property
world.

~~~
kierank
_There's nothing about On2 that's worth more than ~$10m._

It has quite a large customer base. Brightcove, Skype, Youtube to name a few.

Obviously not in the league of H.264 though.

EDIT: but still lossmaking...<http://www.on2.com/file.php?228>

~~~
DarkShikari
Youtube doesn't, and as far as I know, never did use VP6.

Additionally, I'm not so sure a large customer-base is even a _good thing_ ;
everyone I've talked to who has used their VP6 encoder engine on a server farm
comments on how much of a crashy, buggy piece of crap it is. This reputation
is not going to help grow the business in the future even if they _do_ produce
a good product.

~~~
kierank
Yeah, you're right, youtube uses SVQ.

~~~
DarkShikari
No, they used Sorenson H.263, aka "FLV1" (I assume that's what you meant
though). SVQ1 was a vector-quantizer codec used by Quicktime in the 90s, and
SVQ3 is another Quicktime format which is a ripoff of H.264.

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dtf
So are they going to license VP8 for money or open it? Android and possibly
HTML5 could stand to gain a lot from this, I guess. [VP8 was touted as better-
performing than H.264, with suitability still for low power (eg ARM)
platforms... though haven't seen any results yet]

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tamas
On2 is the company that originally developed the VP3 codec, on which the Ogg
Theora codec is based.

~~~
dtf
Interestingly enough, On2 didn't develop VP3 either - they acquired it when
they bought MetaVisual Creations.

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callmeed
I'm in the middle of a project that uses their FlixCloud service for on-demand
transcoding ... I hope that doesn't die.

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firefoxman1
Wow Google makes $106 million in about 43 hours. If this is accurate
<http://www.incomediary.com/top-earning-websites/> google makes almost 700
dollars per second.

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iamcalledrob
Maybe this means they'll open up some of their windows-only codecs for us.

I downloaded some content recently that was VP8 encoded. Came with
instructions to download a codec.. which is Windows XP and higher only.

Not even VLC can play that.

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mindhacker
Google's press release:
[http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/ir_20090805.htm...](http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/ir_20090805.html)

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Maxious
Have Google neutralised any remotely possible patent threat from On2 over
Theora now? Can we finally get on with implementing <video>?

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dtf
On2 released all the patents they had on VP3 when they gave it to Xiph. Apple
and Nokia's patent concerns (if they were genuine) were to do with unknown
third-party holders of submarine patents. In that respect, I don't think
Google could offer any more protection.

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TrevorJ
The obvious youtube application aside, I wonder if they are looking forward to
the need for video support for chrome OS?

