Google announced it would remove support for a
key video technology from its Chrome browser
yesterday, and the tech community immediately
began debating the company's motives and what
it all means.
The short answer: Google is OK losing with losing
a few Chrome users if it can influence Web
standards to its own benefit.
The technology is the H.264 codec, one of several
methods for compressing and decompressing
video. H.264 is broadly supported -- Microsoft is
big on it, Apple uses it, and hardware makers
have built support for it into graphics processors.
Most Internet video -- including YouTube -- uses
Adobe's Flash technology, which has support for
H.264 built in. Chrome supports Flash, so users
won't see any problems.
The problem will arise when a Web designer
decides to skip Flash and embed video using
HTML5, an emerging set of standards for Web
video. If the video is encoded in H.264, it won't
play in the browser. Instead, users will have to
launch another app, like the Windows Media
Player or QuickTime player, or will have to use
some sort of Chrome plug-in. Google hopes that
this will warn developers away from H.264, and
that they will use a non-patented codec instead,
like Ogg Theora or Google's own WebM.
That's not likely because H.264 is already so
widely supported elsewhere. Chrome only has
10% market share. That's twice what it had a year
ago, but still not enough to influence Web
standards.
So this will turn into one of those niggling
annoyances that could drive Chrome users to
switch back to another browser.
Google claims to object to H.264 because it's
patented. It happens that the patents are owned
by a group of companies that includes Microsoft
and Apple ... but not Google. If Google wants to
support H.264 in Chrome, it's got to pay licensing
fees to its competitors. The fees aren't big -- they
max out at $5 million per year. But this isn't about
the money. This is about the precedent.
If Flash is the present, HTML5 is the future. If
H.264 becomes an officially accepted way of
encoding video for HTML5, Google's competitors
benefit. They may not earn much, but the
precedent of a patented technology owned by
Google competitors being part of a standard?
That's too much for Google to take lying down.
Source: Http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/01/12/businessinsider-google-paints-chrome-into-a-corner-with-open-stance-2011-1.DTL
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