In a move that is earning praise from the Open Source community, Google has joined forces with a variety of industry leaders to redefine video on the web — but not everyone is wildly enthusiastic about the prospects — and industry operators are now left to ask, "what real impact will the move have on adult?"
"A key factor in the web's success is that its core technologies such as HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP, etc. are open and freely implementable," Jeremy Doig, Google's engineering director of video, wrote. "Though video is also now core to the web experience, there is unfortunately no open and free video format that is on par with the leading commercial choices."
Addressing this shortcoming is WebM, which Doig describes as "a broadly-backed community effort to develop a world-class media format for the open web."
Central to WebM is the high-quality VP8 video codec, which Google released under a BSD-style, royalty-free license. In addition to VP8, WebM incorporates the Open Source Vorbis audio codec and a derivative of the Matroska media container.
"The team that created VP8 have been pioneers in video codec development for over a decade," Doig stated. "VP8 delivers high quality video while efficiently adapting to the varying processing and bandwidth conditions found on today's broad range of web-connected devices."
Mozilla and Opera have joined Google Chrome in offering browser support for WebM, along with a host of other companies that see the importance of this technology to the future of online video and are now developing related products and services.
"VP8's efficient bandwidth usage will mean lower serving costs for content publishers and high quality video for end-users," Doig added. "The codec's relative simplicity makes it easy to integrate into existing environments and requires less manual tuning to produce high quality results."
"These existing attributes and the rapid innovation we expect through the open-development process make VP8 well suited for the unique requirements of video on the web," he concluded.
For its part, Microsoft says it will support VP8 for users that have it already installed on their systems, but the codec's integration into its software will not be anytime soon. Rather, Redmond claims that it will exclusively support H.264 as its HTML5 video codec of choice — despite the patent concerns that could see webmasters having to pay Acacia-style end-user royalties on H.264 video after 2016.
Largely intended to facilitate open HTML5 video, one problematic area for adult operators and other content rights holders is the lack of DRM support offered by VP8, coupled with the overall problems of providing DRM via HTML5's new video tag — problems which may have to rely on old-school techniques for a partial solution.
"Watermarking is still possible with WebM or any codec," Google cofounder Sergey Brin said. "Watermarking and fingerprinting have been somewhat effective in keeping content safe and disincentivizing people from making unauthorized copies."
While such simplistic approaches may not be enough in today's tech-savvy climate, existing alternatives offer workable solutions that may extend well into the future.
"We want to see HTML5 get better, but there are many areas where we rely on Flash to do the things we need," Sundar Pichai, Google VP of product management, stated at the recent Google I/O event in San Francisco, adding, "I don't think there will be many changes there."
Although the WebM initiative has not yet reached critical mass, it would be wise for adult producers to monitor the ongoing developments in this arena. WebM and VP8 source code and encoding tools are available at www.webmproject.org.