“Codec Silos” Limit Choice and Market Growth
July 4th, 2006
On June, 30 2006 Mark Glaser wrote:
Movie Download Services Still Need Work. He cites Roberta Zouain’s pack2go blog as saying: “portability is also important — I want to be able to watch the movie not only on my computer, but also on my TV, my iPod, my cell phone, etc. So I should be able to have my content on any format and whenever I want.”
These aspirations are blocked by video technology vendors who use their proprietary file formats and codecs as ways of locking users into their systems. I call these “codec silos”.
I don’t expect iTunes or iPods to support Adobe’s Flash format and codecs. This precludes a terrific opportunity to distribute YouTube’s Flash-based video content on the iPod and iTunes. Hackers do have conversion guides but they are fairly tedious for regular users. However, it is not the goal of YouTube to allow this to happen. Why am I complaining? After all, they are playing $1MM per month in bandwidth to host this video for us. Well, I’m complaining because they use Flash video from Adobe which is just the latest “codec silo” of online media. However, larger distribution opportunities await YouTube beyond the iPod to a broader base of mobile devices.
Why didn’t Adobe (actually Macromedia in this case) choose the H264 standard rather than use a proprietary codec? On2 is the developer of the video codec for Adobe’s Flash video product. It is a significant competitor in terms of quality and it is the clear market leader in terms of client ubiquity. On2 cites the licensing burden of H264 as a core criticism of the standard. Learn more about it here. Adobe and On2 claim that 98% of all computers on the Internet are capable of playing Flash video. Flash support is available on nearly every desktop operating system. They are confident that this will become the defacto standard for video on the Internet. Too confident.
Apple has implemented H264. It helps that their licensing costs are paid to a body, the MPEG LA, which includes themselves. While the H264 codec is a standard, their file format and digital rights management technology creates a silo as their content can only be viewed and edited with their software. Windows users who wish to download Apple’s quicktime player are forced to download and install the 34MB iTunes application. This limits playback of content that has been created for Quicktime as some Windows users wont install all of this software. This does not seem to be a substantial burden however. Apple is seeding its Quicktime technology as a way to force more people into the iTunes network. It seems to be working. Quicktime seems to be the format of choice for vloggers, many of whom use Apple video editing and publishing software to create this content. One recent objection, however, has been from the French government that is seeking to prevent a single vendor lock in for online media distribution. [source]
As for Microsoft Windows Media, its support on the Mac is not certain. “Microsoft will continue to offer Windows Media Player 9 as a free download for Macintosh users, but has no plans to provide future updates or product support for Windows Media Player for Mac.” [source] Microsoft, unlike, Apple had not been willing to sacrifice its core operating software sales to its longer term vision for being a media network. I bet that they are rethinking this now. My hunch is that MS wont open source its codecs (even though it would like to) because this would expose it to further claims that it should be paying for some of the technology within their codec. I expect a steady decline of market share for Windows Media Technologies.
As for RealVideo and the RealPlayer, while support exists on many platforms (MAC and PC OS, Treo, set top box, and handheld) for RealVideo content and while RealNetworks has created the Helix Community Project to move most of their technology into open source, market share for their video format is declining. This despite recent articles citing it as the best codec, including this one from Jan Ozer. RealNetworks’ goal of being a media network made them too heavy-handed with monetizing the RealPlayer with advertising and invasive features like system tray message popups. These decisions have angered many. While their player technology is losing share their services like Rhapsody and the Real Broadcast Network (content distribution) seem to be growing in use. RealNetworks has expanded into casual games and Real.com continues to be a top trafficed site with substantial ad revenue. This will keep RealNetworks alive as a contender in the wings as the market evolves. Recently their Helix Community has made progress with its H264 implementation which is with a standard file format as well (3GPP). Their focus has been on mobile devices which promises to be a much larger distribution opportunity for vloggers than the desktop or the ipod.
Adobe has been developing Flash Lite and FlashCast for mobile devices but it does not support video without another native video playback system which will probably be MPEG4/H264/3GPP anyway.
My prediction is that both Apple and RealNetworks will create interoperable video encoding and distribution systems that will use the H264 codec, the 3GPP file format, RTSP/RTP transport as well as simple HTTP download targeted for mobile platforms that will play well in both the desktop Quicktime player and the RealPlayer. This will enable content distributors to encode video once and reach nearly every consumer. When this happens expect a substantial increase in online video content and market growth.
Hopefully YouTube will make it easy to consume their video on mobile devices. I recommend that they begin to adopt H264 sooner rather than later. This will make it easier to transfer their content to the forthcoming mobile platform of H264/3GP. The sooner this happens, the sooner all video content will be free of the “codec silos”.
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5 Comments Add your own
1. Nathan | July 5th, 2006 at 12:33 am
I don’t particularly care about the details, I just want to view the occasional video content on my linux box without having to go through the hassle of tracking down codecs which may or may not be legal to use in my country, then configure my media player(s) to use them. At the moment, youTube is one of the few video content sites I visit that display video content reliably (as long as you don’t consider the synch issues with the audio and video a problem . . .).
2. Hal Feldman | July 6th, 2006 at 12:51 am
QuickTime actually allows for a standalone install without the iTunes bloat-ware.
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/standalone.html
It is clearly marked on the front QuickTime page.
I agree that h264 is where it is at, although with the content aggregators out there, Flash seems to be gaining momentum…
Too bad, since it is an inferior codec in most every respect.
3. John Krull | July 6th, 2006 at 3:28 am
I’m glad to see the decline of having, say, 6 or 9 video format from which to choose. Right now both the Flash content and the Quicktime content just work on my Mac so I don’t care that content is ’silo’ed’. Eventually, yes, I’d like to see everyone agree to a standard as more and more video content is available. But for now, it seems like anything that I want to play works on my mac which was not true a short time ago…
4. Obadiah Tarzan Greenberg&&hellip | July 6th, 2006 at 4:35 am
[...] PodSlug has a great post today covering the ongoing issues with what he calls “codec silos” (Real, QuickTime, Windows Media, Flash). This is a perennial debate for us here at webcast.berkeley. [...]
5. Crazy Ivan | July 6th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
The following is a good explaination from an a former Macromedia, now an Adobe engineer, as to why they choose the On2 VP6 codec. I think they made a good choice although I’d like to see them upgrade to the VP7 codec.
http://www.kaourantin.net/archive/2005_08_01_flashgraphics_archive.html
The quest for a new video codec in Flash 8
(especially how I think each codec did on these points)
Here and there I sometimes see disappointed comments about the fact that we did not pick H.264/AVC as our next generation codec. This in their opinion would have provided the ultimate video quality based on a widely adopted industry standard. Every time I feel compelled to explain the long process we went through to find a better video codec. Quality and standards are just two criterias we used and while they are important others were much more important. Let me put together a (incomplete) list here. I can’t talk about all the gory details obviously, that would get me into trouble
Quality. This is the first thing we looked at and our target was to eat least cut the bandwidth in half while keeping the same visual quality.
Code size. You wouldn’t believe the difference we saw here. Everything from a few kilobytes to a megabyte. Download size is one of the strengths of Flash and we had to keep the code as small as possible.
Portability. We do not only need to support Intel, but also PowerPC, ARM, MIPS and many others. Recompiling for a new platform had to be painless and essentially require no code changes. Optional availability of specialized code was a plus too, although we could have done some of that work ourselves.
Stability. This does not only mean crashers, but an ever changing source code base or file format are real problems when creating SDKs.
Legacy hardware support. It’s nice to have a new shiny video codec, but if it does not run on an older Macintosh what’s the point? Flash is about ubiquity, not forcing people to upgrade hardware or even require specialized hardware. Our target was a Pentium III 500Mhz and a Mac G3 running at 800Mhz.
Hardware support. Looks like it’s a conflict with the previous item, but it’s not. We were looking for a codec which could benefit from standard graphics hardware in the future, things like iDCT, YUV conversion/display, motion compensation etc. A lot of experimental codecs failed miserably here.
Performance. When your CPU usage doubles during complex scenes I consider a codec to have a serious performance problem. In some cases the video codecs we tested were dropping frames on a 3.4Ghz Pentium 4!
Completeness. This mostly affects standards based codecs. If only half of the specification is implemented why even claiming to be compliant? We went this route before with Sorenson Spark which is an incomplete implementation of H.263 and it bit us badly when trying to implement certain solutions. Many codecs failed on this one.
Strong support. We were looking for a codec which had excellent support from the vendor, including the ability to come up with customs solutions very quickly, both on the client and deployment side. They also had to have the ability to support not only us, but any 3rd party interested in Flash Video. A vendor which saw us as just another potential to dump their prefabricated closed solution on us was simply not interesting. Our goal is to create a complete ecosystem around Flash Video with as many players as possible.
Good encoding tools. Another lesson we learned is that good encoding tools are essential for customers. If the vendor is able to provide alternatives to ours, even better.
Risks for Macromedia. We had to know exactly what we were getting into. A codec with an open ended license agreement which has to be renegociated every few years simply bear incalculable risks for a company the size of Macromedia.
Risks for customers. Same as the previous, but some codecs required to make a difference between the player and the video streams served by customers.
Costs for customers. If you have to pay a fee for streaming your video over the web it can be a real problem. I understand that this model works well for dedicated hardware and I support it. But how do you keep track of this on the web? This is Flash. It would be like asking for money everytime you use a certain HTML tag on your web pages.
ROI for customers. This was probably the most important of them all. Flash Video had to be cheaper and easier to deploy than any other solution out there.
All in all the On2 VP6 codec stood out on most of these points. We did not drop H.264/AVC because Macromedia is an evil company who likes everything to be proprietary, on the contrary. We were looking for the best balance on all of the above points. If the choice we made was the right one remains to be seen, but overall I am extremly happy, the video quality is really outstanding. Give it a try.
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