Google Buys Video Company On2 for $106.5M | Hacker News Reader

Google Buys Video Company On2 for $106.5M

gigaom.com

72 pointsprocyon27 comments

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.

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?

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.

Remember, On2 already disclaimed all patent rights to VP3, so buying them shouldn't have any effect in that regard.

Doesn't matter, the nice thing about software patents is that somebody somewhere could have a patent on using the number '2' in a video codec. And you never know until they get bought out by your enemy.

Of course, but the point is that if there is a submarine patent--On2 doesn't have it, someone else does, because On2 already disclaimed all of their rights.

And yes, video formats and encoders are notorious for incredibly trivial and retarded patents.

For example, Predicted_MV = Median(Left_MV,Top_MV,TopRight_MV) is patented.

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.

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

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.

Yeah, you're right, youtube uses SVQ.

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.

Yeah, they also made VP6 which is a Flash video format (arguably on par with H264). It's not a bad move on Google's part, despite the open source alternatives that exist.

VP6 which is a Flash video format (arguably on par with H264)

I have no idea where this misinformation comes from. VP6 was released well before H.264 and was meant to compete with MPEG-4 Part 2, aka Xvid, DivX, etc. It did that well; it is probably at least comparable to Xvid, though I haven't tested VP6 myself. It is nowhere near H.264, however. A good H.264 encoder can probably beat VP6 by a factor of two in compression.

VP7 was meant to compete with H.264, and is not supported by Flash. It, however, was only competitive with very early H.264 encoders, which were quite bad. It quickly fell out of favor as H.264 encoders got better.

VP8 is meant to compete with H.264 again.

what a bucket of shit

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]

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

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

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

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.

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.

Google's press release: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/ir_20090805.htm...

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

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.

On2 had already disclaimed all their patent rights on Theora.

Any submarine patent threat that does exist wouldn't be from On2, so this wouldn't resolve it if it existed.

<video> has already been implemented by everyone but Microsoft (who has no intention to). The Theora issue never impeded that.

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

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