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  • Google Snaps Up On2 (3 Comments)

  • Bijective BWT (29 Comments)

    David Scott has written a bijective BWT transform, which brings all the advantages of bijectiveness to BWT based compressors. Among other things, making BWT more suitable for compression-before-encryption and also give (slightly) better compression.

  • Asymmetric Binary System (170 Comments)

    Jarek Duda’s “Asymmetric Binary System” promises to be an alternate to arithmetic coding, having all the advantages, but being much simpler. Matt has coded a PAQ based compressor using ABS for back-end encoding. Update: Andrew Polar has written an alternate implementation of ABS.

  • Precomp: More Compression for your Compressed Files (5 Comments)

    So many of today’s files are already compressed (using old, outdated algorithms) that newer algorithms don’t even get a chance to touch them. Christian Schneider’s Precomp comes to rescue by undoing the harm.

  • On2 Technologies is Hiring (1 Comment)

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Google Snaps Up On2

Posted by Mark Nelson on 5th August 2009 | Permanent Link

This article in the Washington Post reports that On2 is being purchased by Google for $106 million in stock.

On2 has a really excellent video codec with some advantages over industry standards from Microsoft and the MPEG. But the relatively small price for a well-established and sporadically profitable company points out the difficulty faced when trying to sell video compression not backed by industry standards groups.

One often used metric on a buyout is the cash value per employee. In this case, it’s roughly $1.75M for each On2 employee. Just to contrast, earlier this year my employer, Cisco Systems Inc., acquired Pure Digital, makers of the Flip video recorder. In that case, the payout per employee was roughly $5.8M per head.

Probably not apples-to-apples, but something to think about.

3 Responses to “Google Snaps Up On2”

  1. Charles Says:
    August 5, 2009 9:26 am

    “On2 has a really excellent video codec with some advantages over industry standards from Microsoft and the MPEG.”

    Like?

    Even if their newest proprietary video codec has slightly higher PSNR than AVC/H.264 as they claim, it’s meaningless.

    It’s like saying you have a combustion engine that gets 5% higher mileage but — oh yeah — it runs on milk instead of gasoline.

    – Charles


  2. Mark Nelson Says:
    August 5, 2009 11:51 am

    You are automatically assuming that “advantages” means better quality compression at lower bit rates.

    In this case, that’s not what I’m referring to.

    Just for example, On2 was selected as the video codec for Flash 8. You can be sure the reasons were licensing, IP entanglement, and CPU cycles. None of these have anything to do with stream quality, but they are all very important in choosing a codec.

    So no, it’s not like saying I have car that gets 5% higher mileage but runs on milk instead of gasoline. It’s like saying “Hey Toyota I have an engine you can put in your car that will reduce your unit costs by 3% and work pretty much as good as your last one, you have invest a few million in tooling, does that work for you?”

    You can get a good idea of what their advantages are by reading the wikipedia page on On2 to see what deals they have closed in the last few years.

    - Mark


  3. gaetano marano Says:
    August 5, 2009 11:35 pm

    –
    the On2 software could be useful (also) to develop a new (Wii/PS3/Xbox-KILLER) Online Gaming Platform, as predicted and explained four days ago in my GoOS blog: http://ow.ly/iScX
    –


This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 6:17 am by Mark Nelson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.