{"id":38816,"date":"2011-01-13T16:39:06","date_gmt":"2011-01-13T16:39:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/this-serves-two-strategic-purposes-for-google\/"},"modified":"2011-01-13T16:39:06","modified_gmt":"2011-01-13T16:39:06","slug":"this-serves-two-strategic-purposes-for-google","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/this-serves-two-strategic-purposes-for-google\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>This serves two strategic purposes for Google. First, it advances a codec that\u2019s de facto controlled by Google at the expense of a codec that is a legitimate open standard controlled by a multi-vendor governance process managed by reputable international standards bodies. (\u201cOpen source\u201d\u00a0!= \u201copen standard\u201d.) And second, it will slow the transition to HTML5 and away from Flash by creating more confusion about which codec to use for HTML5 video, which benefits Google by hurting Apple (since Apple doesn\u2019t want to support Flash), but also sucks for users.<\/p>\n<p>It is, in other words, a thoroughly nasty bit of work. It\u2019s not quite as bad as selling consumers down the river to Verizon on \u2018net neutrality, but it\u2019s close. And if Google is actually successful in making WebM, not H.264, the standard codec for web video, they\u2019re literally going to render hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tablets, smartphones, set-top boxes, etc. with H.264 hardware support obsolete.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBut wait!\u201d, the OSS fans are saying. \u201cIsn\u2019t Google really standing up for freedom and justice, because H.264 requires evil patent licensing?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>No. Expert opinion [multimedia.cx] is that WebM infringes on numerous patents in the H.264 pool, and will need a licensing pool of its own to be set up, just like Microsoft\u2019s VC-1 did. So the patents are a wash. This is Google manipulating the market entirely for selfish advantage here, and it\u2019s all the worse because they\u2019re pretending otherwise. And it\u2019s going to be really frustrating watching people fall for it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'>\n<p><a title=\"Google to drop support for H.264 in Chrome\" target=\"_self\" href=\"http:\/\/tech.slashdot.org\/comments.pl?sid=1946532&amp;cid=34842344\">Slashdot<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Google to drop support for H.264 in Chrome<\/p>\n<p> (via <a href=\"http:\/\/bmdesign.tumblr.com\/\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">bmdesign<\/a>)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This serves two strategic purposes for Google. First, it advances a codec that\u2019s de facto controlled by Google at the expense of a codec that is a legitimate open standard controlled by a multi-vendor governance process managed by reputable international standards bodies. (\u201cOpen source\u201d\u00a0!= \u201copen standard\u201d.) And second, it will slow the transition to HTML5 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[780,781,1539],"class_list":{"0":"post-38816","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-quote","5":"hentry","6":"tag-edp","7":"tag-emergent-digital-practices","9":"post_format-post-format-quote"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-a64","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}