The end of the Codec wars
As the battle over HTML5 video codecs has been swirling around us, Google just the whole matter to rest by buying On2.
Goodbye proprietary H. 264 codecs, hello open sourced VP7 and VP8 codecs and congrats to the folks at On2 - who pulled this one out of a hat. yes - they used to worth over $1b, but so was theGlobe.
On2 has been around forever and fought through thick and thin and stayed the course and stayed focused on high quality streaming HD video - and now Google owns it.
It’s nice having an extra $106M in stock handy to resolve these kinds of matters. HTML5 gets state of the art video codecs, Adobe is further fucked and we no longer have to worry about what’s the best video codec to build on top of.
Bingo
Next…..
#1. They haven’t “bought” it yet!!
#2. How the heck do you know what they intend to do with it?
Sorry, pal. It’s not over yet. The shareholders are up in arms, class actions suits, and companies like Oracle, Apple, MSFT, and Cisco are watching this very closely.