Free Knowledge Culture Calendar/August 5

Today in 2009 Google’s acquisition of On2 got announced. After Google promptly gave On2’s top product VP8 to the general public, this proved to be only the first big step in a broader push to break the dominance of patent-encumbered media formats.

On2 was the provider of the main competing formats to MPEG’s lossy video compression standards. The company had previously contributed to the development of patent-free, open-source video compression (leading to OggTheora). Ever since the first MP3 patent infringement letters of 1998, there had been growing discontent with the patent licensing system for MPEG formats that restricted business models involving online media. As a result of particularly brazen royalty demands for the successor to the highly successful MPEG-4 AVC aka. H.264, much of the video coding industry rallied to the cause, culminating in the formation of the Alliance for Open Media consortium and the development of AV1.