Google I/O and Video on the Web
Google I/O is on at the moment, and I'm just catching up after watching initial Keynote and wandering around looking at some of the new products and facilities announced today.
The major item is the absolutely fantastic announcement of Google's opening of their recently acquired VP8 video codec and the establishment of the WebM open media project.
The blow this will deal to H.264 will hopefully be fatal as this proprietary codec has the power to stifle the web every bit as much as it has empowered it to bring you the millions of videos of recent years. I mean - did you realize that with essentially no exceptions, every single use of H.264, whether through a paid license for your camera or application, or their "free" license for creating/viewing on the web, you, the end user of those cameras and video editing/creation suites cannot use the resulting images commercially without breaking the terms of the license and being open to law suit by MPG LA, the patent holder group. You can't sell your photos/videos! You can't advertise beside them! You certainly can't create advertisements with them!
Many of us are waiting for the other shoe to drop on this one. Will the (US) government step in and rule that this is restraint of trade? Or will MPEG LA start suing their "customers" like the RIAA and MPAA are doing?
Of course the fact that Adobe is going to put the VP8 inside Flash will help, but they really should simply concentrate on making HTML5 with WebM video their default standard for all new web creation software.
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