There are three reasons to introduce an alternative to H.264:
- It’s technically better.
- It doesn’t require patent licensing.
- You want more control over web video than the multivendor H.264 standardization process provides.
VP8 isn’t technically better than H.264, and it will almost certainly have the sort of patent problems that will require a licensing pool to be set up, just as with Microsoft’s VC-1, another attempt at a patent-free H.264 alternative.
That means what Google is after is control.
Google has played the PR game masterfully here. The release of VP8 is being hailed as a victory for openness. Meanwhile, if VP8 were to actually displace H.264, then instead of a codec controlled through an ISO standardization process involving dozens of vendors, you would have a codec controlled almost entirely by Google.
Advocates of open computing need to think really, really hard about what’s going on here. A lot of them seem to have declared for Google (and against Apple) because of a couple of fairly trivial technical points with no long-term strategic relevance (Android runs apps that aren’t from its app store, etc.), and some clever rhetoric on Google’s part. But the paradigm that Google wants for the future of computing — cloud-based apps running on Google’s servers — is no more compatible with openness than Apple’s vision of appliance-like computing devices.
In fact, it’s less compatible. Apple’s devices can at least be jailbroken; the cloud can’t be. And Apple doesn’t seem interested in having access to all of your data, whereas Google’s cloud-based vision for computing would involve them having access to all of your data, and Google’s business model, based around targeted advertising, creates an incentive for them to know as much about you as possible.
