[threeseed]

This why everyone should be skeptical about Google's foray into mobile video codecs. They have no "skin in the game". This isn't their core business like companies such as Sony or Adobe. And we all know what happens to Google's non core business products.

[lern_too_spel]

Just like they had no skin in the game with SPDY? The vast majority of their revenue stream comes from the web platform, and video is becoming more important to the success of any development platform as bandwidth gets cheaper. Unlike the other companies, they don't care about getting paid for the video technology itself, which would only slow down video adoption on the web. Unlike Apple and Microsoft (both perennial laggards on html5test.com), which have alternate platforms to push, Google does not want to slow down adoption of video on the web.

[threeseed]

It is a fact that the longer a page takes to render affects the number of users who stay on that page. That would be pretty damn important for a company who makes most of their revenue from web advertising. Which is why Google will continue to push ANY technology e.g. SPDY that makes web pages faster.

VP9 does not fit in with their goal of getting more eyeballs on ads which is what makes it odd for them to push. There is no evidence what so ever of H.264 has resulted or will continue to result in a lack of adoption of video on the web. All evidence is to the contrary. In fact it is the strength of YouTube that has resulted in a lack of diversity in video sites.

[blackoil]

If VP9 is just 5% better, bandwidth saving itself for YouTube will be substantial, also if ads do not buffer, they'll be more acceptable than video ads that buffer.

[acdha]

> If VP9 is just 5% better, bandwidth saving itself for YouTube will be substantial

You should look at this from a business perspective: how substantial would those savings need to be to justify a billion-dollar scale investment?

VP9 codec development alone has been expensive and that's not even including the significant hardware engineering costs needed to make it competitive with the MPEG group's standards on all but the highest-end desktop computers.

Meanwhile, H.264 is a mature, widely-adopted technology and H.265 is following the same path (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding_im...) with many implementations announced.

YouTube makes money from people watching video, not from sales of any particular video codec. They're already using H.264 for everything and will need to add H.265 support for the same reason.

So if we look at this from the perspective of a business manager:

1. Make a significant investment making VP9 appealing enough to produce the widespread adoption needed to see significant bandwidth savings.

2. Use the same MPEG codecs for all visitors – dropping support for interoperability with Apple, Microsoft, etc. isn't likely so they're going to need an H.265 path either way. This has no significant upfront costs because they can use the same tools as everyone else and get the same bandwidth savings.

From that perspective, the question is really whether the HEVC license fees are going to be higher than the cost of funding VP9. There's some intangible value in having an alternative if the MPEG group gets greedy and it might help them negotiate more favorable rates, too, but I'm pretty sure none of that is enough to confidently say that Google's senior management won't consider cutting it the next time they need the right news for Wall Street.

[mda]

I really can't follow your logic.

On the contrary, Google spends a lot of resources to make web faster, research shown that faster web sites creates better user engagement and satisfaction, hence better revenue.

[madeofpalk]

Did you forget about Android? That's a pretty significant amount of... skin.

[acdha]

The question you need to ask is how much a video codec factors into Android's success. What would happen if they dropped VP8/VP9 entirely? Every single video on YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc. would still play. Nobody would encounter problems with video chat, sharing, etc. because those apps all require H.264 unless they only support Android users with high-end CPUs.

At the end of the day, VP8/VP9 is interesting as a possible bandwidth optimization or share certain patent/free software positions. It's just hard to believe that this would decide even a single phone purchase, much less enough to significantly affect Android development priorities.

[taf2]

Do they actually have a good way to monetize android - are they selling phones? Last I checked they had a great search engine. How does the revenue model on mobile compare? Android is different on every oem so though it might be huge - is it really even a google product or more of a Google open source project?

[microtonal]

Do they actually have a good way to monetize android

As far as I understand, the initial motivation is to avoid being locked out. Suppose that iOS held 80% of the market, they could change the default engine, replace Google Maps with Apple Maps (like they did), etc. Given that smartphones and tablets are now commonly used to access the web, Google could have lost a serious chunk of traffic.

In other words, Google does not have to monetize Android directly, it exists to keep people in Google's ecosystem.

[threeseed]

Android isn't a product for Google. It's a channel to route users to advertisements.

[threeseed]

That makes no sense. Android is no different to Windows or OSX. It is irrelevant which codec it uses. It doesn't benefit the platform either way to use VP9, MPEG2, H.265 or any other codec.

Sure there are royalty costs for using H.265. But one could argue that (a) Android already costs money due to Microsoft licensing and (b) there are likely patent issues with VP9 just like there was with VP8.