why open video?

by Christopher Blizzard

[ Note: Mike Shaver gives the short version of this post.  I have done a great job of burying the lead here. There's a post from the Wikimedia Foundation on the topic and a post in the Mozilla Blog as well. ]

[ Update: There's a good note on ajaxian, the most important of which is the last paragraph.  Have a look. ]

Everyone agrees that the open web is becoming more important in our shared human experience.  Our applications, conversations and relationships are moving online and Mozilla finds itself more and more at the heart of defining both the underlying technology and the end-user experience of users of the web.  It’s an important role to have, and it’s one of the reasons why operating as a non-profit with a full understanding of our mission and impact are important.

Taking the long view, the open web as a technology platform isn’t something that we see in human history very often.  The printing press let you replicate knowledge cheaply and easily.  Television and radio lowered the cost of distribution of media.  The web took away the centralization of big media and anyone can produce and distribute.  The costs of replication, distribution and reaction have dropped to near zero.

I personally believe that this is because of the technology choices that were made in the early days of the evolution of the web.  Human-readable formats for documents, simple programs delivered as source code and the ability for anyone to be able to post and create.  There were no ivory towers or professional developers in those early days so the act of creation had to be simple.  Web technology required you to be technical-minded, but didn’t require huge amounts of training to get started.  Mixed with the end-to-end principle of the Internet and the fact that just about anyone could set up a server or a client meant that the web didn’t grow with the backing of huge players, but became a huge shared collection based on the small efforts of thousands of individuals.

The result of that has been an explosion of creativity and investment from single individuals all the way up to the largest companies.  Anyone can have an impact and anyone can affect the technology direction of the web.  Because anyone can build tools without permission that speak the lingua franca of the web, you can find tools to do just about anything.  It’s a truly vibrant marketplace.

There’s one exception to this: video on the web.  Although videos are available on the web via sites like youtube, they don’t share the same democratized characteristics that have made the web vibrant and distributed.  And it shows.  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 youtube 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.

In my mind there are two things that help drive that kind of decentralization:

  • You should be able to easily understand how something moves from a computer-readable format to something that is presented to a user.  For example, turning HTML into a document, turning a JPEG file into a picture on the screen or using HTTP to download a file.
  • You must be able to implement and deliver that technology without requiring anyone’s permission or license.  In reality this means that it should be available on a royalty-free basis and without encumbered documentation.

In the video world, there are some formats that fit the first quality:  Some formats are documented, understood and even widely deployed.  But more often than not they are subject to to per-unit royalties, large up-front fees and creating content in those formats (the encoders) are often so expensive as to be prohibitive to all but only the deepest-pocketed corporations or well-funded startups.  And there are very few video formats that meet the second.  This is not the kind of decentralization that made the web thrive.  It is quite the opposite.

So now we get to the Mozilla part of this story: what we’re doing about this.

  • In Firefox 3.1 we’re including support for the OGG container format with the Theora video and Vorbis audio codecs for the <video> element.  They represent one of the few combinations of formats that fits both the criteria above.  They aren’t perfect formats, but they are certainly good enough for how video is used on the web today.  And they are improving with time.
  • We’re also supporting the development of open video with a grant of $100,000 (USD) that will be administered by the Wikimedia Foundation to develop and support Theora.  You should expect to see some really great stuff coming out of that funding.  That work will make its way back into Firefox as well.
  • The other thing we’re able to do is to make video a first class citizen on the web.  This means we can do things with video and let it interact with other types of content (SVG, Canvas, HTML) in ways that haven’t been possible to date.  We hope that by releasing video from the plugin prison and letting it play nice with others we’ll be able to open up a new wave of creativity around video.  But more on that in another post.

We don’t expect that by doing this we’ll change things overnight.  Far from it – changes like this take time.  But we can certainly do our part to at least make it possible for these things to develop.  We want to see a market for video like we’ve seen for the web.  And this is our put to get that process started.