Video on the web has been a slow, rocky progression. First there was the Real Media player that came pretty close to killing video on the web altogether. Then there was competing embedded media with Apple’s QuickTime and Microsoft’s Windows Media. More recently, Adobe’s Flash became the go-to method for embedding video on a website. Moving forward, the H.264 video standard has become the de-facto standard for delivering video on the web.
Unfortunately, H.264 is an open but non-royalty-free standard that has significant licensing issues on the commercial production side. Last August, MPEG-LA, the group that oversees licensing for H.264, announced that H.264 would remain royalty-free for the entire life of the license for end-users. The significant licenses on the commercial production side would remain in place.
Citing its “closed” nature, Google has announced it is dropping support of the H.264 video standard in its Chrome browser.
Google points to the launch last year of its own WebM (VP8) project as an attempt to bring yet another open video codec to maturity. The problem is that both WebM and Theora are both quite immature and browser support is limited to Firefox (and now Chrome). H.264 has become the de-facto standard. As a result of Google’s move, the transition to HTML5 just became even more complicated as web publishers will face having to encode video on their websites in at least two different formats.
It’s especially troubling that Google hypocritically continues to support the closed and proprietary Adobe Flash in its browser. One could reasonably assume this lastest move by Google is just an escalation of its pissing match with Apple. Even more troubling is that WebM is in no way patent-safe, as it likely infringes on patents in the H.264 pool.
For web end-users, this is similar to the situation surrounding the .gif image file format when Unisys decided to enforce it’s .gif-related patents. In 1999 Unisys started asking websites—but only some websites—for US$5,000-US$7,500 for use of its technology that had found its way onto just about every website on the internet. Patented technologies like .gif and H.264 are antithetical to the royalty-free foundation on which the web grew. Royalty-free means that you can build anything you like on the web without having to license software from anyone or asking anyone’s permission.
While H.264 isn’t free for commercial use, it has become ubiquitous. And therein lies the problem, according to some. As the network effects of H.264’s ubiquity grow, there’s nothing stopping MPEG-LA from lowering the licensing boom once H.264 is baked into every—or nearly every—browser distributed. But according to Ed Bott, writing for ZDnet, there is no royalty trap: “The fear implicit in this entire argument is that when the H.264 license has to be renewed in 2016, MPEG LA will unconscionably raise those rates. If that fear were legitimate, would more than 800 companies, including Google, have already decided to license H.264? Maybe they actually read the license agreement, which specifies that ‘the License will be renewable for successive five-year periods for the life of any Portfolio patent on reasonable terms and conditions. ... [F]or the protection of licensees, royalty rates applicable to specific license grants or specific licensed products will not increase by more than ten percent (10%) at each renewal.’”
Google’s dropping H.264 support from its Chrome browser will do little to nothing to advance a royalty-free web. Rather, it will likely more deeply entrench the problematic—and commercial—Adobe Flash as the de-facto standard for embedded video on the web.
Here’s how the major browser market breaks down:
- Chrome 8: Ogg Theora, WebM
- Firefox 3: Ogg Theora
- Firefox 4: WebM
- Internet Explorer 8: None
- Internet Explorer 9: H.264
- Opera 10: Ogg Theora, WebM
- Safari 5: H.264
Flash is a proprietary video wrapper that makes the video playable on any device which has Flash installed. Flash supports H.264 and will soon support WebM, so content creators that aren’t interested in encoding at least two video formats will take the Flash shortcut. That takes care of the desktop. But what about mobile? Flash isn’t supported on Apple’s iOS because of battery life and performance. The best video performance on mobile devices is, hands-down, H.264. So, time- and budget-constrained content creators will most likely encode video in H.264, wrap it in Flash for the desktop, and serve it as native HTML5 to mobile devices. Why not just use H.264 for all video?
The situation is summed up nicely by Znu on Slashdot: “This serves two strategic purposes for Google. First, it advances a codec that’s de facto controlled by Google at the expense of a codec that is a legitimate open standard controlled by a multi-vendor governance process managed by reputable international standards bodies. (‘Open source’ != ‘open standard.’) And second, it will slow the transition to HTML5 and away from Flash by creating more confusion about which codec to use for HTML5 video, which benefits Google by hurting Apple (since Apple doesn’t want to support Flash), but also sucks for users.”
Also, be sure to read John Gruber’s “Simple Questions for Google Regarding Chrome’s Dropping of H.264.”
If there’s any justice on the web—and there is—Google’s Chrome browser market share (currently about 10 percent) will drop precipitously into irrelevance.
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