On2 Technologies has a bizarre take on the world of video — it complains that companies spend too much time worrying about standards,
On2 CEO Douglas McIntyre says that his company is moving ahead of competing Windows Media and Real video codecs that are “growing long in the tooth,” and innovation was held up by such strict adherence to standards by both companies.
“The bottom line is that while our competitors make promises and debate in standards committees, On2 is delivering concrete results in marketable products,” said McIntyre.
Certainly the underlying basics are correct — if you wanted to start a company and create a codec that deliver the highest possible quality, probably the easiest way to get there would be to forget about any standards and create a completely proprietary codec tied to a specific technology/hardware platform.
What you lose, of course, is the ability for someone to take a video file in your proprietary codec and easily be played across a variety of hardware and software platforms.
On2’s major deployment appears to be in distributing video over XM Satellite, and in that particular case it may actually make sense to say “screw the standards” since they only have to worry about supporting XM. But if they want to go beyond such closed environments, ignoring and deriding standards committees and video standards is simply stupid.
Yes, it takes awhile from standard adoption to actual widespread availability, especially since a lot of video devices are embedded systems where you can’t necessarily just add the latest video codec at the drop of a hat. But its a worthwhile tradeoff to have that interoperability that standards provide.
Its a shame the article doesn’t say which codec he’s dissing precisely. H.264, which is finally seeing widespread adoption? Frankly, I’m extremely impressed in what I see from H.264 in a wide variety of video applications. I doubt On2’s codec can come close to matching the features of H.264.
Source:
On2: Standards Hurt Video Innovation. Ed Oswald and Nate Mook, Beta News, January 10, 2005.