What Google’s WebM Looks Like to Video Digerati in San Diego and Boston

It’s been a week since Google announced a new open-source video project called WebM at its I/O Developers Conference in San Francisco, with the online media giant arguing that streaming video—like nearly everything else on the Internet—just wants to be free. So it seemed like a good time to see how some digital video technology companies are reacting to the move.

In announcing its WebM project, Google (which owns YouTube) said it was joining forces with roughly 40 other companies, including Japan’s Sony, Intel, Adobe, and Logitech to promote the use of WebM under a permissive free software license. Conspicuously missing from the list were Microsoft and Apple. In its statement, the Mountain View, CA, company said, “With Google TV, consumers will now be able to search and watch an expanded universe of content available from a variety of sources including TV providers, the web, their personal content libraries, and mobile applications.”

The WebM technology includes the VP8 video codec, which Google acquired as part of its $140 million buyout of On2 Technologies earlier this year, and Ogg Vorbis, an open source audio codec that’s already widely implemented. A wrinkle that drew much media attention, however, is that Google’s plans to freely license WebM technology could run afoul of MPEG LA—the licensing body for the rival H.264 video codec.

So what was the reaction among digital video leaders from coast to coast?

—At Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]), the vice president of product management in CDMA Technologies, Rag Talluri, writes in a blog post that the San Diego wireless giant is “a strong supporter” of WebM and openly available standards. “This is why we are excited that the company behind the biggest online video portal is enabling the VP8 initiative,” Talluri says. “We thus continue to collaborate with On2/Google’s engineering teams to support VP8 codec on our mobile platforms and deliver a rich video experience on Qualcomm-powered mobile devices. “

—In Cambridge, MA, Brightcove marketing vice

Pages: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.