Luther went on to explain that Google did a lot of work on the security layer that delivers the videos encrypted to an HTML5 player. “As far as I know, we are the first to ever do that,” he said.

He added that there is a lot of interest from other content services to use this type of technology for their offerings as well because it would allow them to deliver video to a variety of platforms that support HTML5, as opposed to customizing solutions for each and every platform. “A lot of content providers really want to do HTML5,” he said.

WebM was open sourced by Google in 2010, and the company has been working on integrating the format into both real-time video communication as well as video delivery for sites like YouTube. It was meant to become an open, royalty-free alternative to the predominant H.264 video codec, but the overwhelming majority of videos are arguably still delivered in H.264. Luther replied Wednesday by saying that H.264 had the same kind of adoption curve, adding: “I’m very bullish on VP8 for the next … many years.”

Nonetheless, Google is already working on a successor to WebM’s VP8 video codec, which is unsurprisingly called VP9. “VP9 is starting to come together, and we are seeing some pretty amazing results,” reported Luther. “We are seeing huge imporvements over VP8. It’s kind of a gigantic leap forward.”

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Google open sourced WebM more than two years ago, and YouTube has been working on converting all of its assets to the format for some time. However, on the web, most videos are still being streamed in H.264, and only users who opt into the site’s HTML5 trial, and also use a supported browser, get to see some of the videos in WebM.

On the Wii, things are looking decidedly different: WebM is the primary video format used in the app, and codecs like H.263 are only used as a fall-back option. This makes the app “the largest deployment of WebM video in the world today,” according to a YouTube spokesperson.

YouTube has been aggressively working on rolling out native and content-centric app experiences on as many platforms as possible, with an app for the video site now being available on over 400 million devices. Part of this has to do with the fact that it’s easier to monetize content in a native app experience. But going native also allows YouTube to add other functionality, like the AirPlay-like experience it rolled out on Google TV earlier this week, which the company intends to bring to other platforms and devices in the coming months.

Update: YouTube is explaining some of the technical background of its WebM implementation on the Wii in a post on its developer blog.

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MKV is an open container format for video files that has become particularly popular with people who download HD movies or TV shows from the Internet. However, don’t expect your Ice Cream Sandwich handset to natively play all your BitTorrent downloads; the MKV support in Android 4.0 is restricted to MKV files that use Google’s VP8 codec, which is also used in WebM.

Google released WebM under an open-source license in early 2010, which is based on the company’s VP8 video codec. The format has since slowly gained traction; YouTube, for example, has converted almost all of its videos to WebM, and Skype is using VP8 as its default codec for video conferencing.

Adding support for WebM streaming and VP8 MKVs shouldn’t matter as much to end users, but it should lead to an increased adoption of the formats among developers. VP8 has been optimized for real-time video applications, which means video conferencing app developers now have an option to rely on a royalty-free codec on new Android handsets.

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Skype has been using VP8 for group video calls since late last year, but the adoption of the codec for one-on-one calls as well is definitely a boost for Google’s open video ambitions. Google open sourced VP8 in May of 2010 as part of its WebM video format, but many end users likely haven’t seen VP8 in action just yet. WebM is supported by Chrome, Opera and Firefox, and YouTube has been converting its entire catalog to the format. However, the site still serves up H.264-encoded videos in Flash by default, and users have to opt in to a special trial to get to see the WebM versions of YouTube videos.

The codec has also been targeted by patent pool entity MPEG LA, which is threatening to form a patent pool for VP8. Google has maintained that companies adopting WebM or VP8 have nothing to fear, and the fact that a company that’s being acquired by Microsoft is willing to put its eggs in the open codec basket definitely should quell some fears and possibly encourage other video sites as well as video conferencing providers to switch to embrace the format. One should note, however, that Microsoft has so far shied away from adopting WebM for its Internet Explorer browser.

WebM developers have long been saying that it is well-suited for real-time applications, and Google itself is working on making VP8 the default video codec for both Google Talk and its new group video chat platform Google+ Hangouts.

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WebM is based on the VP8 codec that Google acquired as part of its purchase of On2 Technologies in early 2010. Google released WebM with a royalty-free, open-source license a few months later, and since then it has been busy building support for the format by layering it into various Google products.

The search giant dropped support for H.264 in the latest version of its Chrome browser, making WebM the only natively supported format for HTML5 video. It has also been busy transcoding YouTube videos to support WebM for HTML5 video playback.

MPEG LA’s plans to establish a patent pool to be used against WebM are nothing new, as the latest statements follow previous threats by the licensing group. (See here and here.) But this is the first time the group has given a hint that it actually has some patent holders on board to back those threats.

As we’ve written before, MPEG LA’s threats come with a few caveats:

First, despite several similar warnings against [Ogg] Theora, MPEG LA has never acted to enforce its patents against that open-source codec. But Theora has been around since 2000, and as such one could argue that as a result, MPEG LA would have a difficult time enforcing the patents that it supposedly infringes on. But VP8 is more or less brand-spanking new, and therefore fair game.

Second, Google has a lot more resources than Xiph.org — the group that controls Theora — does, and won’t be going down without a fight. It spent more than $120 million to purchase On2 and its technology, and wouldn’t have done so if it weren’t committed to making VP8 open source. Not only that, but the search giant said it’s done its due diligence and is confident that VP8 doesn’t infringe on others’ patents.

Google seems to be readying its own defense against MPEG LA’s patent pool, as it has gotten such companies as LG Electronics and Cisco to provide some backing through the WebM Community Cross-License. At the same time, just the threat of patent litigation against those who choose to adopt the WebM format might be enough to keep some publishers and developers away.

All of that said, all this saber-rattling might not even matter: Despite Google’s best efforts to push adoption for WebM, the format has gotten very little takeup from other publishers or developers. Recent research from MeFeedia found that nearly 70 percent of all videos it indexed were encoded with H.264, compared with just 2 percent of those encoded in WebM.

Photo courtesy of (CC BY 2.0) Flickr user cell105

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H.264′s market share continues to widen over competing video formats, as it now accounts for nearly 70 percent of videos indexed by MeFeedia. That’s a huge increase in a very short amount of time, as just last May, when only about 25 percent of videos were available in the H.264 format. And while the percentage growth has slowed in recent quarters, it remains the dominant format for streaming video delivery.

The growth in H.264 encodes is being driven by the adoption of video on tablet devices like the iPad , as well as connected TVs, Blu-ray players and other broadband-enabled video devices. Due to hardware acceleration built into many existing connected device chipsets, H.264 is by far the dominant format for smart TVs and related products.

It’s also an acknowledgement of the strength of the iPad for mobile viewing. There are more than 200 million iOS devices on the market, including 25 million iPads, and H.264 video is the best way to reach those devices. According to MeFeedia, the iPad has the highest engagement among devices, with 40 percent more videos viewed per use than Android, iPhone and desktop users.

While H.264 continues to dominate, the latest numbers on Google’s open-source WebM video format show that it has yet to catch on with publishers. More than a year after its launch, WebM accounts for less than 2 percent of videos indexed, according to MeFeedia. While that is expected to grow — particularly as YouTube continues its process of transcoding all its videos into the WebM format — it’s still a pretty small number for a codec that boasts fairly broad browser adoption and growing support from consumer device manufacturers.

WebM is supported by Firefox, Opera and Google’s Chrome web browsers. In that latter case, in fact, WebM is the default video codec supported for HTML5 video playback, as Google removed support for H.264 in the latest version of Chrome. It’s also gained some hardware backing from consumer electronics manufacturers like Samsung, LG Electronics and Cisco, and has been available on Android devices since the release of Gingerbread.

Despite growing support, it may still take some time before WebM gains the type of hardware acceleration required for broad publisher usage. The good news for Google — and for WebM advocates — is that things can change quickly in the online video market. One need only look at the massive increase in H.264 adoption to see that.

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Fast forward four years: YouTube is still around, but everything else has changed. None of the other user-generated video companies still exist in their original form. Adobe Flash is still the default option for video playback, but it’s far from ubiquitous. Browsers are now a grab bag of market share: IE (39 percent), Firefox (30 percent), Chrome (16 percent), Safari (6 percent) and Opera (2 percent).

Meanwhile, HTML5 promises to reinvent the video experience through the native use of the video tag and built-in codec support. And Apple iOS devices — which don’t support Flash — have now grown to more than 2 percent of all web browsing, with no sign of slowing. Finally, there’s a revolution taking place on the TV screen: Internet-connected “smart” TVs are everywhere, and video game consoles and other devices are providing a home to every type of content known to man.

Consumers today demand a TV-quality experience across every device they own. Among key demographics, video is now an always-on, always-with-you endeavor.

In 2007, moving video from camera to production to finished output involved little encoding mastery. That experience was mainly about getting a single compression right — a 1:1 ratio of source files to renditions, if you will. Back then:

• Codecs mainly served a single purpose: Flash playback. Most consumption occurred through progressive download, usually over HTTP. The biggest drawback was buffering, or the starting, stopping, stuttering and waiting for a video experience as files arrived at different times.
• Higher bit rates, which offer the promise of higher quality, simply take up more bandwidth, which increases wait times and consumer abandonment rates. Internet connection speeds, especially those in the United States, were also fairly slow. The median U.S. download speed was less than 2 Mbps.
• Screen resolutions were fairly small. Since they were consistently lower than 1024×768 pixels, that meant native 1080p video was impossible and 720p video was out of reach for a significant portion of Internet viewers.

How are things different today?

• There are a wide variety of codecs and player types. Flash is still the dominant Web-only playback runtime, but it features a variety of codecs. It’s also common to see H.264/AVC as the primary codec for Apple’s iOS devices. And the coming HTML5 wave includes WebM, Ogg Theora and H.264/AVC as natively supported codecs, depending on the browser choice.
• The median download speed for the nation is 3 Mbps.
• The primary method for delivering video is streaming, and with the advent of adaptive bit rate technology, companies are creating a better user experience. But adaptive bit rate is based around multiple renditions of the same video, which means cutting it into five-second chunks with multiple bit rates supported.
• More than 85 percent of browsers support screen resolutions higher than 1024×768, compared to only 26 percent four years ago.

Today, the testing, tuning and optimizing of one video to a given screen involves a lot more work: There are many more codecs, screens and processor types that go into delivering an optimal playback experience to an audience. That’s all forcing video content providers to think about more than just the creation of content.

Publishers now have to consider which video players, which browsers, how much network bandwidth and which supported devices they plan to target. They need one rendition of the file for each combination of target device, bit rate and network they choose to deliver to. It’s not uncommon for the most ambitious video distributors to create and deliver upwards of 100 video renditions per source video asset.

So what is the solution?

The video production industry needs to take a strong guiding hand to educate and inform content creators what their choices are, how they might plan efficient strategies to meet their goals, and how to future-proof their infrastructure for what are undoubtedly irreversible trends.

Photo courtesy of (CC BY 2.0) Flickr user .:[Melissa]:.

Eric Quanstrom is the COO of Sorenson Media, a vendor with wide expertise in the space of video encoding and transformation.

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Google has been quiet about its plans for Hangouts, and hasn’t revealed all that much about some of the components powering the service either. However, there have been some key developments in recent months that indicate what makes Hangouts work and where things are going:

The cloud

Making video chat work at scale can require a lot of resources, which is why there has been a movement towards peer-to-peer (P2P) solutions to offload video and signaling traffic between the clients involved. Skype makes use of P2P for that very reason, as does Chatroulette. However, P2P can introduce latency, which can be especially bothersome if you chat with 10 people at a time. That’s why Google went down a different route for Hangout.

“To support Hangouts, we built an all-new standards-based cloud video conferencing platform,” explained Google Real-time Communications Tech Lead Justin Uberti in a blog post on Tuesday. He added that Hangouts uses a client-server model which “leverages the power of Google’s infrastructure.”

Browser integration

Hangouts currently requires you to download the same plugin that also powers video chat within Google Talk. However, Google is working on making both Hangouts and Google Talk itself work in the browser, without the need for any plugins. This will be done in part through a new framework for realtime communications (read: text, voice and video chat) dubbed WebRTC that the company open-sourced in May. WebRTC is supported by Mozilla and Opera, and Google started to integrate the framework into its Chrome browser earlier this month. “Work has started to move Google Talk completely to WebRTC,” it says on the project’s web site.

At that point, users won’t need a plugin anymore to use Google Talk, and the same should eventually be true for Hangouts. Here’s what a Google spokesperson told me via email about the connection bewteen the Google+ video chat service and the framework: “A lot of the technology in Hangouts feeds into the WebRTC, and we contribute a lot of feedback to help shape the WebRTC interface. At this point though, our plug-in and the protocol are different efforts.” He refused to reveal any future plans, but trust me, the writing is on the wall…

Open codecs

Google Talk and Hangouts currently use technology Google is licensing from Vidyo to facilitate video chats. Video is transmitted in H.264/SVC, with H.264/AVC and H.263 being used as fallback solutions. However, there are strong signs Google will eventually switch to open codecs.

Google open-sourced its VP8 video codec last year as part of the new WebM video format, and real-time communications were one of the big issues that VP8’s programmers wanted to improve with the codec from the onset. In fact, VP8 is already being used by Skype for its group video calling feature, and Google’s WebM project manager John Luther wrote in February that VP8 is an “exceptionally good codec for real-time applications like videoconferencing.”

So when will Hangouts be switching from H.264 to WebM? Google+ Project Lead Bradley Horowitz indicated on This Week in Google on Wednesday that his team is already testing alternatives to the current codec. A Google spokesperson didn’t want to discuss any future plans for Hangouts when I asked about the codec issue, but here’s a clue: WebRTC is based on the VP8 codec, which means that H.264 could get displaced as the default codec for Hangouts as soon as the video chat service rolls out its native browser integration.

Device integration

This is where things get really interesting: Hangout’s cloud-based architecture and its upcoming browser integration will eventually make it possible to deliver an optimized group video chat experience to a whole range of devices. Desktop users will get to view full HD video, users on mobile devices will receive optimized streams to deal with bandwidth issues. And Google TV users could see Hangouts appear on their TV sets sooner than they think, because Google TV comes with a full-blown Chrome browser.

A few companies have started to bring multi-person video chat to mobile devices, but cross-device video conferencing is still in its infancy, and Google could have a good chance here to capture the market early on. Of course, the company didn’t want to comment on the specifics of bringing Hangouts to mobile devices, but what Google’s spokesperson told me wasn’t exactly a denial either:

“Again, we can’t comment on future product plans. However, Google Plus heavily invests in mobile products as we believe you should be able to share and communicate, whether you are on the web, tablet, or phone.”

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The whole cross-licensing approach is a little bit curious. Here’s how it works: Google still believes it holds all the rights related to the VP8 video codec that’s at the core of WebM. However, if it turned out that some of WebM’s technology was covered by a patent held by Cisco for example, Cisco would automatically grant a royalty-free license for this technology to all of the other participants of the initiative. Mike Jazayeri, director of product management at Google for WebM, was quick to point out during a conversation last week that this “doesn’t imply that any of these companies have licenses” related to the format. But you know, just in case…

This isn’t the first time big companies band together like this to use cross-licensing to protect themselves against open source-related patent litigation. The Open Invention Network, whose members include IBM, Sony and Red Hat, uses a comparable approach to issue royalty-free licenses of Linux-related patents.

That Google now establishes a similar alliance for WebM shows how serious patent-related issues are for the format. Apple CEO Steve Jobs threatened early on to attack open video codecs, and H.264 patent pool administrator MPEG LA finally came out of the woodwork in February and issued a call for patents to form a WebM patent pool. A patent pool like this it could eventually be used to go after anyone embracing WebM, including the companies that just joined the cross-licensing initiative. Jazayeri tried to downplay this development, saying that the cross-licensing initiative was well in the works when MPEG LA made its announcement. “They have raised some vague claims and really haven’t back that up,” he said about the MPEG LA.

Still, all the saber-rattling by Apple, MPEG LA and others may have dissuaded some from using WebM. Jazayeri said the project was happy about the format’s current adoption rate, but admitted that “there have been some questions raised” about possible legal implications of using the format.

One of the companies that has officially been on the sidelines is Microsoft. Redmond initially stated that it wasn’t going to support WebM due to legal concerns, but quickly softened its stance by saying that Internet Explorer users would be able to play content encoded with the format if they installed a third-party codec. Google has since published a plug-in that makes it possible to play WebM content in IE 9, and Jazayeri told me that Microsoft wasn’t just all talk about enabling support for the codec. “Their engineers and our engineers worked closely together,” he said.

Maybe that’s the biggest part of today’s announcement: It shows a growing commitment between big companies like LG and Samsung to take a chance on WebM. It will still take some time before we’ll actually see the codec becoming part of their products, but Jazayeri said that he expects consumer hardware capable of WebM encoding and decoding in U.S. shelves by the end of this or early next year.

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From the blog post:

“Given the massive size of our catalog — nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day — this is quite the undertaking. So far we’ve already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM.”

YouTube started to transcode some of its catalog right after Google open-sourced WebM last May, and WebM Product Manager John Luther said last November that the site had made 80 percent of the most popular videos available in WebM.

However, most YouTube users won’t get to see any of the clips in the new format; users have to have a browser supporting WebM and actively opt into the HTML5 trial. WebM is currently supported by Firefox, Chrome and Opera. IE users can watch WebM videos by installing an additional codec, and Apple’s Steve Jobs has made it clear he won’t support WebM at all.

The open format recently made headlines when MPEG LA opened up a call for patents to form a WebM patent pool. Google has rejected the idea that WebM is subject to patents held by other companies.

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