WebM video format

Question: Is Google-fu powerful enough to make a success story out of WebM, a new, open-source video format for rich-media web delivery? Answer: It’s complicated.

The popular video-sharing site Vimeo announced this week that it was revamping its playback for better compatibility with mobile devices that don’t support Flash video. Basically, that means the iPhone and the iPad. Vimeo will automatically serve a different version of the video player — Flash or HTML5 — depending on the environment it’s being viewed in. (There’s a clear explanation of how this works at the Vimeo Staff Blog.)

That’s great news for content creators who use Vimeo to distribute their video online. But publishers and web developers are finding the environment for online video delivery is far from settled. Apple claims to have plenty of good reasons not to support Flash in its iOS operating system, ranging from battery consumption on mobile devices to a reluctance to let Adobe become a middleman between Apple and its application developers.

Ever since the arrival of the iPad, as sexy a content-distribution platform as has ever existed, the new HTML5 standards for embedding video in a web page have been widely seen as a good solution for distributing content that would be encoded as a Flash video if only Apple’s popular devices played Flash. As heavy hitters like Daily Motion, YouTube, and Vimeo rolled out HTML5 content, it started to look like there was an easy solution — encode your video using the high-quality, widely supported H.264 codec and put it up on the Web alongside a Flash version (for browsers that don’t yet support HTML5).

Alas, H.264 isn’t quite a panacea. It’s a patented codec, with licenses administered by the MPEG-LA licensing authority, so there are costs involved for companies who want to license the technology, and that means at least two popular web browsers, Mozilla Firefox and Opera, aren’t supporting H.264 playback. (In fact, the old-school Ogg Theora format was originally suggested as the standard HTML5 format specifically because it did not carry any patent baggage, although it seemed in many ways ill-suited to the task.) In a blog post, Mozilla engineering veep Mike Shaver estimated the annual cost of H.264 support at $5,000,000.

Also, there is the spectre of potential new licensing fees somewhere down the road. It doesn’t cost anything for a publisher to stream H.264 to users yet, and MPEG-LA recently promised not to implement any such charges through 2016. That earned this response, via Twitter, from Mozilla CEO John Lilly: “It’s like five more years of free to lock you in forever.” If video delivery using H.264 is well-monetized by then, the MPEG-LA licensors will be positioned to take a piece of the action.

What’s the Internet to do? Open-source it, of course! Google made a splash in tech circles in May, when it announced that it would make the VP8 codec from recently acquired On2 Technologies open-source and royalty-free in perpetuity as part of the new format WebM. Firefox and Opera will, unsurprisingly, play WebM video in their browsers, Adobe will build it into Flash, and hardware providers including AMD and NVIDIA have offered their support. But, get this, Microsoft is not planning to build support into Internet Explorer, still the dominant web browser by a country mile. What’s more, some technical comparisons seem to suggest that WebM doesn’t offer compelling advantages over H.264 in terms of efficiency, quality, or performance. It’s also possible that MPEG-LA may claim that WebM qualifies as a patent infringement. All of that makes it a tough sell.

That’s a shame, not only because it would be nice for publishers to be able to adopt a single solution for video delivery across the mobile web, but also because open-source initiatives have driven a lot of the accessibility and innovation that made the Internet such a powerful medium. It will be interesting to see which formats take hold as the market develops — but Microsoft and Apple seem to be happy with H.264, and they aren’t likely to be the first to blink.