Google's web video ambitions bump into hard reality (opens in new tab)

Given a release announcement and an article citing multiple independent sources, I'd guess the article is more likely to give a balanced view of reality…

It's also replacing GIF in places and seems to nullify the claims that missing support in Safari or IE is a problem. My gut feeling is that Microsoft and Apple have competitive (destroy Google) or ulterior motives and financial gains in mind in terms of actively blocking WebM. This stinks of anti-competitive behavior in need of regulation. If Google had actually acted on their plans to push WebM and phase out H.264 it could have either destroyed YouTube (highly unlikely) or fixed the video codec situation.

was there any news of daala recently?

What metric is being used to compare VPxyz with H264 and HEVC? PSNR? SSIM? Double-blind tests? Encode/decode performance? Hardware complexity? Patent encumbrance?

Not if the new versions preserve compatibility. But it's true that the technology with the longer view, with fewer major changes, might prevail on that basis alone.

You have to look at it in context. The alternative to HTML5 EME is not un-DRMed content but rather the entire commercial video industry mandating non-web technology. That leads to vendor lock-in, security problems and increases the barriers to entry for everyone involved in video:

* Cool device? Now you need to convince (read pay) Adobe or Microsoft to port Flash/Silverlight to it or develop a native app and make it non-horrible e.g. for Netflix users to find and use. * Create a new video codec? You have to add support to Flash/Silverlight before most people can use it * Want to put video online? If any of it's for sale, you have to build out a full Flash/Silverlight stack to support it.

That's expensive and as we've seen it's a huge security hazard and generally holds technology back – e.g. neither Flash nor Silverlight play back H.264 anywhere near as efficiently as the native OS despite having years to add decent hardware acceleration.

From the perspective of a web-focused company like Google, that's a lot of downside with no advantage. Even Microsoft and Adobe aren't interested in doing much with Flash and Silverlight and they're expensive to keep alive as niche media playback platforms. That's why we ended up with EME in the first place – it allows every single component except for the actual decryption to use the standard web stack.

If Firefox shipped Daala tomorrow, YouTube could start serving it next week rather than wait a year or two for it to go through the release cycle at Adobe/Microsoft.

If a video site needs to support both open and encumbered media (a given for all but a few markets) this allows them to keep every single part the same except for the encryption stage without a degraded or inconsistent user experience.

DRM won't go away overnight, so we're going to see sites selling both and making that process as easy as possible will hasten the time where we can see an actual market response to restrictions – both from consumers being less willing to pay full price for encumbered content and from sites who are tired of DRM licensing eating into their revenue. If that's as simple as unchecking the “Use EME” box, you'll see a lot more willingness to experiment that you will if it's “Change our video production and serving pipeline away from the expensive Flash Media Server setup we already paid for”.

Patent-free video is good for the web, and makes it more likely to get broad support. So good for Google.

DRM in HTML5 means that you don't need Flash/Silverlight to play Netflix, etc. Which means that you can support video more easily. So good for Google.

I think it's because Google is trying to avoid patents, libx264 doesn't.