Mozilla to fund open-source web video tech development

January 26, 2009 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

Firefox browser-maker Mozilla is pushing a new set of video technologies that won’t require users to install software plugins, while offering developers lower costs and greater flexibility. The nonprofit is pledging $100,000 in grant money for third-parties who are building for an open-source video encoding technology called Theora. Mozilla already supports Theora in the 3.1 version of Firefox it is working on in beta now, along with open-source multimedia container software Ogg and open-source audio software Vorbis.

Here’s why. While components of Flash are free, for example, it requires expensive hosting technology and expensive authoring software (a professional version of Adobe’s authoring software for Flash costs $699, for example). The result is centralization not seen around other technologies like image-encoding, as Mozilla engineer Christopher Blizzard explains in his blog post about the news:

That centralization has created some interesting problems that have symptoms like censorship via abuse of the DMCA and an overly-concentrated audience on a few sites that have the resources and technology to host video. I believe that problems like the ones we see with [Y]outube are a symptom of the larger problem of the lack of decentralization and competition in video technology – very different than where the rest of the web is today.

The Theora video player interface will include basic features like a play/pause button and a progress bar, and can be customized to suit developers’ individual needs. The Ogg format allows users to easily embed these videos into web pages. Eventually, the technology may enable more interactivity between videos and the rest of the web, like ways to easily identify links within parts of a video.

One has to wonder how other browsers will treat the possible rise of Ogg and Theora. Microsoft has both its own video technology, Silverlight, and its Internet Explorer web browser, which is still the largest browser in the world. Apple has Quicktime and Safari. But Opera, a smaller browser player, also already supports Theora. Then there’s Google, which pays millions of dollars a month to host YouTube videos. Open-source video formats could end up saving Google money and do things like make video more easily accessible to search engines. It wouldn’t be suprising to see Google build Theora support into Chrome. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Google also supports Mozilla through a lucrative search deal.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • bill_mcgonigle
    Google's support of Mozilla is none too altruistic - they want that traffic and are willing to pay for it so they can sell their ads. Some see Chrome as an attempt to pull back some of that revenue. Given the IT challenges of replicating YouTube, I suspect Google would be better off with an open streaming solution, since they're not likely to lose too much traffic over it.