Today, we’re pleased to announce our support for WebM, an open and free standard for video on the Internet. Part of the reason the Internet has been so successful is because of free and open standards, like HTTP, TCP/IP, and HTML, that served as the building blocks for the web as we know it today.

Over the last few years, the consumption of video on the web has exploded. Unfortunately, there are no free and open standards for video. The use of H.264 has gained popularity and has become widely used, but H.264 requires users of this standard pay a licensing fee to the MPEG-LA, a consortium of companies that control the patents for technologies associated with H.264.

The MPEG-LA has so far not aggressively pursued licensing fees for publishers and content owners using H.264, but there exists the possibility that they will do so in the future. The potentially significant added expense associated with H.264 could negatively impact the health of the video ecosystem on the Internet.

Until today, there was no free and open alternative to H.264 that enjoyed broad support by industry leaders. However, that has changed with the introduction of WebM, in addition to Delve Networks, leaders like Adobe, Google, Mozilla, YouTube, Opera, and many others have thrown their support behind WebM.

What is included in WebM?

• VP8 Video Codec – This is a high quality codec developed by On2, a leader in video codec technology, and acquired by Google. The VP8 codec has been made available under a royalty-free license.
• Vorbis – This is an existing open source and widely accepted audio codec.
• A container format that is optimized for a web-based playback experience, e.g., quick start-times, seeking into video.

What are the benefits of WebM?

• Free & Open – Publishers, content owners, technology vendors, advertisers, can invest in the encoding of their content into the WebM standard without fear of vendor lock-in or threat of excessive licensing fees that would harm their business.

• Superior Video Playback – WebM has been developed with web playback in mind, which results in a codec and container format optimized for fast start-times, seeking within video, support for sub-titles and video transcription.

• Low CPU Impact - WebM video can be decoded for playback on any device, e.g., mobile phones, iPads, laptops, without requiring a lot of CPU cycles. This ensures a smooth playback on devices that lack powerful CPUs and reduces the impact on battery life.

It is still early and H.264 will remain prevalent and important for our customers. However, we believe that WebM is an important step forward for the industry and that is why we’ve chosen to support it as an open and free video standard for the web.

Alexander Castro, Founder & CEO

Update: Alex offers more of this thoughts on WebM in an interview with Brier Dudley