Google has announced it will purchase On2 for $106 million. According to the e-mail I got from On2 this morning it was made pretty clear that they are purchasing ALL of On2 and not just the VP6 CODEC. My question is... why purchase any of it?
YouTube already uses h.264 for much of their compression. In fact you can even download these higher quality h.264 copies with a little bookmarklet hack for your browser. There are currently 4 quality settings for YouTube:
- fmt=0 which is the default low quality video and uses the Sorenson Spark CODEC
- fmt=6 which is a higher quality but still the Sorenson Spark CODEC
- fmt=18 which is the HQ h.264 version
- fmt=22 which is the HD h.264 version
Where is the On2 VP6 CODEC in that list? As far as I can tell, they just skipped over VP6 and moved straight to h.264.
So I ask again, why did Google buy On2? The only available product that I see they have which Google would be interested in would be VP6, so there are only three other reasons I can think of that Google would do this:
- Google does not want to pay the h.264 royalties. While better than the MPEG-4 royalties (or at least less complex) they are still there.
- On2 has a patent of sorts that Google needs access to, probably in relation to automatic compression of video in some form, or a next gen CODEC.
- Google wants to piss off Adobe and lock VP6 out of the hands of many users forcing Adobe to dump the CODEC and move to something else within Flash.
Heck to Google $106 million is nothing, but this does not make sense. Will On2 get put in to the Google closet of doom along with Dodgeball, Jaiku and Google Video? Will Google utilize On2's products to make a new killer online video app or addition to the Tube? Thoughts?
