The encyclopedia · Software & IT · Strategic decision · 2010
Google gave away VP8 in WebM to break the web video patent toll.
At Google I/O in 2010 Google open-sourced the VP8 codec, wrapped it in WebM and made it royalty-free, giving the web a video format without H.264 fees.
Google · On2 Technologies · Mozilla · Opera
the move
H.264 was the de facto web video format, but its patents were administered by the MPEG-LA licensing pool, a toll that made open alternatives attractive to browser makers.
On 18 May 2010, at Google I/O, Google announced it was fully open-sourcing the VP8 codec acquired with On2 and making it totally royalty-free. It also introduced the WebM container, based on Matroska, holding only VP8 video and Vorbis audio with a .webm extension.
Mozilla, Opera, Adobe, NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and 40-plus partners signed on, and Google said it would re-encode its YouTube HD catalogue into VP8, giving Apple and Microsoft a strong reason to follow.
why it works
- Royalty-free VP8 removed the H.264 patent fee a browser maker must pay
- A Matroska-based container and open Vorbis made the whole stack free
- YouTube's audience gave Google leverage to push browser adoption
- Open-sourcing it let every vendor embed the decoder for zero cost
what transfers
A license fee is a market structure, and a rival that declares the core free can flip the whole standard. Giving away the scarce asset is often the cheapest way to make it the default.
what came after
WebM and its successor VP9/AV1 became the open web video path, though patent questions lingered and H.264 remained supported. The play established the modern pattern of a company buying a codec and publishing it to standardize the web.
references
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