Google and Video

[bryant]

Google hates H.264! H.264 is used almost everywhere, not just for Web video; it’s also the Blu-Ray encoding standard. So this is very exciting.

Despite my knee-jerk pro-Apple response, I believe that Google is correct in stating that WebM is the better political choice for Web standards. It is open in the sense that there’s no licensing fee and Google has no ability to institute one. It is not an open standard insofar as the standard does not belong to an impartial standards body, which is slightly problematic, but practically speaking it’s not a huge deal. H.264 does, FWIW, belong to such a body. But it’s not free to license, and that is again the more important issue.

WebM may not be the better choice from a legal point of view, in that we don’t know if it’s encumbered by patents. It would be nice if Google would indemnify people using WebM from patent lawsuits, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to require them to do so. Google doesn’t have to do your legal work for you, even if it would be nice if they did. Anyhow, I am not competent to have an opinion on the legal issues, so “we don’t know.” If I needed to make a corporate decision about this I’d pay for a lawyer to tell me things.

Technically speaking I don’t care. Web video is not the place where I demand top-notch video quality. H.264 might be better; even if it is, it’s not going to matter 99% of the time.

Now the fun part. Google’s stance, while correct, is in direct conflict with their Flash support. Google’s statement: “Adobe Flash Player is the most widely used web browser plug-in. It enables a wide range of applications and content on the Internet, from games, to video, to enterprise apps.” So, yes, this is true. Likewise, H.264 is the most widely used Web video format, which enables a wide range of video on the Internet. You’re either making decisions based on usage or not.

Which makes me suspect that Google is, with WebM, making the right decision for the wrong reasons. This only makes me about 50% happy.

Edit: this post makes the excellent point that Flash does share one key characteristic with WebM: namely, it’s free to distribute. However, Adobe has not to my knowledge guaranteed this in perpetuity.

Mirrored from Population: One.

Comments

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

*tries to think what he can say without inviting a lawsuit from his former employer*

Let's just say that if Google's position looks incoherent externally, it's probably a reflection of a not-holding-well detente between a number of factions internally. And until YouTube is consistently and usefully profitable (and not in a "hey, we're cash-positive this quarter if you squint really hard at the numbers" way, but a for-real "we're actually making significant headway against the debt of the last 4 years of insane capex and headcount investment" way), things are not going to get any less confusing.

[bryant]

I am not even remotely surprised at the idea that a company the size of Google has internal debates. Someone somewhere said something about engineering-driven decisions; if I learned that the engineering consensus was to drop Flash but that it was overriden by business necessity, I would believe it. I also might make the same decisions if I were in charge. Or, hey, it could be a completely different conflict.

I mostly wrote this to clarify what I was thinking, because I did have that Apple-centric pissed off kneejerk response and I wanted to figure out if I was even remotely right or not. Google's not evil, Google's just a company.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

if I learned that the engineering consensus was to drop Flash but that it was overriden by business necessity, I would believe it.

I suspect it's more that there are two entirely parallel engineering/management consensus tracks at work here. The Chrome team is not answerable to Youtube, nor vice-versa, and it's... culturally unlikely that anyone would force them to harmonize their stories.

[bryant]

Heh.