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Comment by andreyf | Hacker News Reader

At launch, On2 went so far as to claim that it could provide “50 percent bandwidth savings compared to leading H.264 implementations.”

Considering the amount of bandwidth Google spends on streaming YouTube content, this move is far from altruistic. The more viewers adopt a bandwidth-superior format, the less terabytes of data to stream, the less the cost of running YouTube. They have absolutely no benefit from any kind of "platform/api lockin" to H.264 or any other video standard, only that there are less bits to stream.

I don't see how it's an "uphill battle" to convince anyone they should use a free standard instead of paying million of dollars in licensing fees per year. I'd expect Microsoft to ship this instead of H.264 in the next major IE, and, if this comes with a good and open hardware interpreter, Apple to follow soon after.

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  Considering the amount of bandwidth Google spends on streaming YouTube content, this move is far from altruistic.

Who cares? Companies are allowed to make the world a better place without having to self-flagellate themselves. Google could easily have just paid the H.264 licensing fees and told Mozilla to toss off, or even built VP8 support into Chrome and used YouTube to force-feed it to the world. They chose to cooperate, and should be praised for that.

  I don't see how it's an "uphill battle" to convince anyone they should use a free standard instead of paying million of dollars in licensing fees

Several companies, most notably Apple, have already spent what must be millions of dollars on licensing fees and hardware. Regardless of which is a better long-term choice, it can be very difficult to reverse that much momentum. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of non-consumer multimedia equipment which is designed to use H.264.

Additionally, VP8 does not have much application support yet. It'll take a while for codecs to be written, debugged, and distributed to users. There may be significant lag time before VP8 displaces Theora among F/OSS users, or H.264 on OS X.

They chose the path that would lead to the fastest adoption of the technology which lowers their bandwidth costs. Keeping the technology Chrome-only is against their financial interests.

Apple and MS pay yearly licensing fees for H.264. As soon as they adopt VP8, they can stop.

Apple and Microsoft are among the H.264 licensors. I think they don't pay any licensing fees:

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx

While I'm not arguing with the "less bandwidth is good" argument, I think it's a very common misconception that the amount of bandwidth YouTube uses is a significant financial strain on Google.

For example, on the YouTube blog Google have said:

The truth is that all our infrastructure is built from scratch, which means models that use standard industry pricing are too high when it comes to bandwidth and similar costs. We are at a point where growth is definitely good for our bottom line, not bad. http://ytbizblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/youtube-myth-busting.h...

Wired wrote a piece where they interviewed a network analyst who thinks Google's bandwidth bill is close to zero:

"I think Google’s transit costs are close to zero," said Craig Labovitz, the chief scientist for Arbor Networks and a longtime internet researcher. Arbor Networks, which sells network monitoring equipment used by about 70 percent of the net’s ISPs, likely knows more about the net’s ebbs and flows than anyone outside of the National Security Agency. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/youtube-bandwidth/

I haven't found anyone who believes On2's claims, so I wouldn't be quick to believe the bandwidth saving argument.

Apple and MS have already paid for the H.264 licenses; they can't remove H.264 from OS X or Windows since it would cause major backlash.

No one will remove H.264 - it's a great codec with wide support. It's more likely that we'll be in a world with two good video codecs, not just one. VP8 will hopefully become the HTML5 video standard, and H.264 will remain in Flash (which will still be useful for a long time), most browsers, many mobile devices, and on the desktop.

Incidentally, this has been the state of audio for a long time - mp3 and aac are both good codecs, and both are really widely supported. (Vorbis is reasonably good too, though not as widely supported. Maybe that will change with HTML5.)

Lower bandwidth consumption is good for consumers too.

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