Thoughts on WebM and the future of online video
It’s a bit of an understatement to say that the unveiling of the WebM project has caused a lot of chatter in the video world. Today I spent some idle cycles thinking about it and its impact after playing with the code and reading the documentation.
Looking five years down the road, I believe the majority of Internet video will not be watched within a web browser. It will be watched on flat screen televisions, handheld tablets, mobile phones… you get the picture. H.264 is set to dominate in this vision of the future, simply because H.264 not only has a huge head start, but the hardware decoding exists and is mature.
WebM may come to dominate HTML5 video in the web browser. It’s likely that it will, considering the project is under Google’s umbrella, which is the same umbrella that YouTube is under. Unless Google fosters hardware support for VP8 and really rams it down the throats of the companies making Android-based devices, it’s highly unlikely VP8 will catch up to H.264 on TVs and devices.
Either way, it will be an interesting five years.
Yes.
Despite the release of WebM, everyone will continue to support h.264, including Google. It’s part of the Blu Ray spec. It’s built into nearly every net-connected TV and set top box. It’s the format of choice for iPod/iPhone/iPad. MPEG LA will be generous when it comes to licensing issues in order to ensure continued support. WebM can provide a valuable service and will undoubtedly find a home in the video universe. But h.264 will win.
It will be interesting to see what happens on the patent front with webm as well. We’ll support it as an upload format shortly, but given my experiences with performance and size it’s unlikely we’ll encode to it in the near term. There’s a lot of room for improvement.
