

Google's H.264 decision: It's all about YouTube costs - TomOfTTB
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/googles-h264-decision-its-all-about-youtube-costs/15529

======
tzs
This makes no sense. He seems to talking about the cost of having to store
multiple formats. However, the only reason they have both WebM and H.264 is
because they spent $100 million to acquire WebM. They could have simply not
bought WebM, saved $100 million, and they would not have the storage problem.

It would make more sense if it is about the licensing cost of H.264, for the
encoder they use and for their commercial streaming of H.264 video (does it
count as commercial when they are not charging users for the video, but are
monetizing the site with advertising?).

However, given the cap on annual license fees under the H.264 license, what
they spent to acquire WebM would have covered their YouTube H.264 license fees
through the remaining lifetime of the H.264 patents.

~~~
TREYisRAD
Confirmation bias, the author is a Infrastructure Architect, so he sees the
problem as such.

> Infrastructure build-out and optimization strategy is something I know a
> great deal about. It’s what I do as my day job as an Infrastructure
> Architect at IBM — understanding what our customers need to do in order to
> minimize their infrastructure overhead in terms of systems, storage,
> networking and facilities as they plan for further growth.

~~~
simias
And yet he seems to believe petabytes are bigger than exabytes. This and the
rest of the text makes me believe he doesn't know perfectly his subjet, to say
the least...

Storage is cheap, and getting cheaper by the day. I don't think there's any
reason to believe it's not going to continue that way in the foreseeable
future.

EDIT: to give some numbers to the argument, I know that two years ago you
could buy one petabyte (that's one million gigabyte) worth of storage for less
than a million $.

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antimatter15
The AVC (h.264) licensing rate according to (
[http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Arti...](http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65357&PageNum=2)
) goes up to $100,000 per year for over a million subscribers and can not
exceed $5 million a year per enterprise. AAC, the audio codec that usually
goes along with AVC might be $1,200,000 per year (
<http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/aac-fees.aspx> ).

Given that the last AVC patents expire at 2028, there's seventeen years left
where Google might still have to pay the annual fee that wouldn't exceed a few
million dollars (though at the last few years when there's something like one
patent that's still valid, I doubt the patent pool really could be enforced).
The On2 acquisition was $124.6 million (
[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9159738/Google_closes...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9159738/Google_closes_On2_acquisition_for_124.6M)
) and probably a lot more for the ongoing development.

Assuming, rather reasonably that there's 12 years left for AVC (that's
doubtful, it'll probably be ancient in a few years), the recurring fees for
YouTube's licensing would need to exceed $10 million a year for the argument
to make sense.

~~~
_delirium
The license even perpetually exempts non-subscription, non-pay-per-view
internet broadcast, so Google won't owe _any_ royalties unless they start
broadcasting on television, start offering a subscription version of YouTube,
or start offering pay-per-view videos.

See the top of the last page of:
[http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsS...](http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf)

------
davej
This just doesn't make any sense. They still need to transcode to H.264 for
Mobile Safari, Safari (using Youtube's HTML5 mode) and soon IE9 too; _none_ of
these have announced plans to support WebM. Not to mention the fact that the
flash videos are generally H.264 wrapped in Flash. If they wanted to cut
storage costs then they'd be better off dropping support for WebM.

Also, I'd imagine that the storage cost for Youtube doesn't come close to
their bandwidth costs.

~~~
TomOfTTB
I think Google's playing the long game here. So they won't switch tomorrow but
they'll try to make WebM the defacto standard by getting everyone but Apple on
board. Then they'll leverage the open nature of the codec and its new found
market dominance to force Apple's hand.

This is the same strategy Apple's using against Flash by only supporting HTML5
and to my eyes it's working.

~~~
davej
Apple's reasons for not supporting Flash on their mobile platform are
primarily performance reasons.

It's not only Apple that isn't supporting WebM by the way, IE9 won't support
it (unless you have a VP8 codec installed). In fact, the only browsers that
currently support WebM in their latest stable versions are Chrome and Opera.
Remember that flash doesn't support WebM yet either.

WebM might well become more popular than H.264 for web video in the next
couple of years and I wouldn't be all that surprised if Apple supported WebM
in their next Safari release. But… I'd still be very surprised if YouTube
stopped encoding videos into H.264 in this decade.

~~~
clark-kent
Mozilla is also supporting it. Upcoming Firefox versions will support WebM.
Even IE9 will support WebM with HTML5 when the codec is installed locally on
windows.

~~~
danudey
As will Safari on Mac (it supports theora if a codec is installed).

------
swalberg
He seems to harp on the costs of a SAN as one of the drivers(not surprisingly,
he's an IBMer), but according to <http://highscalability.com/youtube-
architecture> they're running off of BigTable.

~~~
gvb
BigTable is basically a (distributed) Google-proprietary SAN. Lots of Storage,
distributed over a really big Area ;-), and lots of Networking.

~~~
YabbaMon
BigTable is a SAN without the SAN cost. It's all software.

~~~
bl4k
That is more accurate. In terms of hardware + software it is closest to the
Sun storage appliances which are Solaris or Linux with ZFS plus management
tools.

The Sun promotional literature[1] refers to 70%+ cost savings on their units
over comparable systems from EMC (the old school market leader). It was the
fastest growing product at Sun, as it allowed companies to cut down storage
costs using a model similar to what Google pioneered with Big Table and GFS.

[1] [http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-
storage/storage/un...](http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-
storage/storage/unified-storage/index.html)

------
morrow
I'm starting to think the real reason behind this is that google hasn't been
able to flesh out any of it's flash-based advertising products for html5, and
know that it won't be easy to do so (people can hide ad divs or download the
source videos trivially; no way for them to guarantee content protection to
publishers). I think that they realize that the only way for them to stick
with flash without being seen as behind the times or anti-"open" is for them
to prolong the codec dispute by requiring flash for all of the h264 videos out
there by removing native support. As a side effect, users of safari and IE who
want to view youtube webm content will have to use a flash wrapper as well if
I understand it correctly. This isn't to say that a long term goal of html5
video served via a patent-unencumbered coded isn't a motivation of theirs, I
just think that the decision to remove native h264 _right now_ is more of a
way to keep flash a practical option than an ideological move.

~~~
yesbabyyes
_This isn't to say that a long term goal of html5 video served via a patent-
unencumbered coded isn't a motivation of theirs, I just think that the
decision to remove native h264 right now is more of a way to keep flash a
practical option than an ideological move._

If they want to achieve that long term goal, isn't it obviously better to act
sooner rather than later?

~~~
morrow
I agree, but it depends on how much removing native support for h264 this soon
advances the state of html5. We are still convincing content-publishers to
adopt html5. Dropping support right now and forcing people who want to support
html5 video to dual encode and wrap content in flash for the sake of
compatibility might slow adoption more than waiting for more people to get on
first, then pulling the plug.

------
macrael
If this is the truth and they are going to switch completely over to WebM on
YouTube, I have one big question. What does Google gain from having control
over the video format that they wouldn't get from h264? The only operative
difference between the two codecs is that WebM is free. Surely, to justify
being responsible for the enormous amount of money the world will spend to
switch from one to the other, they have a better reason than "it's free."

~~~
TomOfTTB
Not being at another company's mercy seems like reason enough to me. Right now
Google is a company that's sunk hundreds of millions into Android and it's all
at risk because Oracle bought Sun. I'd imagine that wake up call made them
look at other vulnerabilities in their product line.

~~~
macrael
But what company are they at the mercy of for online video? The whole point of
the open standard that is H264 is for a group of companies _not_ to be at each
other's mercy. It seems riskier to switch to a new format created by one
company than to go with the standard everyone else backs. I think there must
be another answer.

~~~
TomOfTTB
MPEG LA can still change the terms whenever they please and theor recent
behavior has been troubling
(<http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100430/0232599255.shtml>)

~~~
danbmil99
This. Look who are major patent holders at MPEG-LA: Microsoft and Apple. Do
you trust your blood enemies to a gentleman's agreement? MPEG-LA has been
decidedly vague and "don't worry, be happy" about their long-term royalty
plans. One might assume they would never increase the price, but can you be
sure?

In fact, MS and Apple could even pull out of MPEG-LA at some point and charge
exorbitant fees. Google simply does not want to be at any risk for that sort
of FUD in the marketplace. I think that, combined with their ideological DNA
(Patents BAAD, open source GOOOD) explains the decision pretty well.

~~~
thomasz
> This. Look who are major patent holders at MPEG-LA: Microsoft and Apple.

Do you have a source for that? I've read quite a few times that at least
Microsoft pays more for licenses than they get back.

~~~
danbmil99
[http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-
att1.p...](http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.pdf)

Microsoft: US patents: US 6,563,953 US 6,735,345 US 7,289,673 and a number of
foreign filings, likely of the same IP.

Apple: US 7,292,636 US 7,548,584 US 7,551,674

US 7,339,991

doesn't matter if they pay in, the point is they are patent holders, and have
a say in licensing terms.

------
wedesoft
It's not about the Youtube servers. I think, it's about the Youtube clients.
Licensing costs may be small for Google but they are not small for
manufacturers of mobile phones.

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KuraFire
Re: [http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/googles-h264-decision-
its-a...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/googles-h264-decision-its-all-
about-youtube-costs/15529) This is a mostly idiotic article.

First of all, for an Infrastructure Architect the guy has his storage
knowledge all backwards: “ _With YouTube, we’re talking about exabytes upon
exabytes of storage. Maybe even petabytes._ ”

1 Exabyte = 1,024 Petabytes = 1,048,576 Terabytes

I’m sure that it was an innocent mixup, but good grief does it come across as
someone who’s trying to appear important and knowledgeable simply by tossing
in some obscure computer terms.

Second, as others have pointed out as well, the whole logic of his argument
doesn’t make sense. Youtube, with all its massiveness, is probably _never_
going to be able to drop H.264 simply because it would no longer be able to
stream its videos to any of the Android [1], iOS, webOS and Blackberry devices
out there today. That’s hundreds of millions of devices that would suddenly
not be able to play Youtube videos anymore if Youtube goes WebM _only_.

( [1] side note: Only Android devices running 2.3 and higher are capable of
WebM, but 1: that's with a battery-draining software renderer and 2: as we
know, Android fragmentation is a pretty serious thing and millions of people
are still running pre-2.3 OSes and there's no way that all of them will be
upgraded at some point.)

Quoth the fool Jason Perlow: _My guess is that in addition to Android
licensees, Apple and other device manufacturers which use embedded browsers
such as RIM are not going to deny their customers and end-users embedded
YouTube video support if Google chooses to encode to to a VP8/Theora standard,
and I would expect the same of Microsoft and Internet Explorer and its
embedded variations as well. Mozilla and Firefox we already know is completely
on-board._

Yes, I'm sure Apple, RIM, Microsoft and HP/Palm can somehow _magically_
upgrade all the devices they have already sold to millions of customers and
add WebM support to them. It’s not like if you're the owner of an iPhone 3G
you can't install the very latest version of iOS on your device. Oh, wait. You
can't.

Simply put, the chance of Youtube dropping H.264 entirely and only maintaining
their videos in WebM container format using VP8 is about 0.01%. It's higher if
you look WAY far into the future, when _absolutely no one_ uses ANY of the
300+ million mobile computing devices we're using today anymore. But that's a
whole lot of years into the future, and also depends entirely on Microsoft and
Apple adding WebM support to their devices when they don't yet have much
incentive to do so. Or at least, it won't be because of Youtube.

There should be no doubt that Google wants there to be only one format for
video on the Web, 20–30 years from now, and that they prefer it to be WebM
instead of H.264 if only so that they (and you, using their infrastructure)
can sell video whenever and wherever they (and you) want without having to pay
MPEG LA for it. Storage and technical specifics of the video format are
secondary concerns which are actually great arguments _against_ this logic,
for the situation in the "short" term that is the coming 5 to 10 years.

So all in all, sure, Youtube is an obvious motivator for this kind of move,
but the article has the entire thing backwards in explaining it.

------
mike463
nah, doubt it.

