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Yet another post on my series on Food. This time it’s a video by Mark Bittman who talks about our food system, what we’ve lost and what we should be doing. (I love his focus on real food – not most of the imitation food we have today.)
Original Post. Licensed as CC-BY-NC-ND.
(Thanks to Deb for finding this!)
Recently, I’ve been doing some posts on food. This is another one.
A friend of mine recently posted a link to a pretty interesting article about an animal model meant to observe the effects of artificial sweeteners on rats. Here’s the money quote:
Even though the saccharin-sweetened yogurt group actually got fewer calories from their yogurt, they gained more weight than the group fed yogurt sweetened with glucose (Swithers & Davidson, 2008; Swithers, Baker, & Davidson, 2009). At the end of 5 weeks of study, the saccharin-fed rats had also gotten significantly fatter than the glucose-fed rats.
With my own body I know that there is some kind of expectation created by texture and flavor when you’re eating a specific food. In my experience, eating artificial sweeteners often makes me hungrier. And after eating a relatively natural diet based on foods that I can recognize, eating something that includes processed ingredients and artificial sweeteners is a shocking experience once I’ve consumed it. I can tell my body doesn’t really know how to react.
If this is something that interests you I also strongly suggest watching the video in my post on sugar by Dr. Robert Lustig as well as the video of Michael Pollan speaking at the Long Now Foundation. These are both long attention span posts, but they are worth your time to understand the world of food we live in.
(I’m aware that there’s some Confirmation Bias in my selection here, but evidence does seem to be aligning with my own personal experience, the experiences of my peers and large groups of people as well – see the videos for more information on the effects of sugar and processed foods.)
For background on the free software angle on this story please check out Robert O’Callahan’s post on this topic. Also check out Mike Shaver’s shorter background post as well. This post differs from theirs in that I want to talk about network effects, why codecs should be considered a fundamental web technology and what the long-term effects of the choices at this inflection point might look like.
Recently Youtube announced that you could test out an HTML5-enabled version of their site. They said that they were doing this partially based on people’s “number one request” that Youtube do more with HTML5. (They left out the other half of that #1 request – that the implementation be based on open codecs, but more on that later.) Not to be outdone, Vimeo rushed to announce a beta version of their player based on their site that claims HTML5 support as well.
To be clear, this is great news. This is just the latest in a long string of changes for video on the web. We started with a raw “player” delivered by Real Media. Then on to media embedded directly in pages via Windows Media + Quicktime. More recently video on the web has been a a platform play by Flash. And finally to a place where media becomes a first class citizen on the web without a single source provider. These moves by Google and Vimeo (and before either of them, DailyMotion) show that things are changing for the better, and faster than I think anyone could have imagined.
The players from Google and Vimeo do present a pretty serious problem, though. Each of these require a proprietary H.264 codec to be able to view them. These codecs aren’t compatible with the royalty-free web standards that the rest of the web is built on. The fact that they are being so unabashedly hyped along with the new darling of the web – HTML5 – means that most people don’t understand that something very dangerous is taking place behind the scenes.
If you think that this isn’t an issue that’s worth worrying about you need to read the rest of this post. In particular the history of GIF shows us what happens when patented technologies are used on the web and what happens when network effects over-run the natural drive to royalty-free technologies at scale. MP3 pricing gives us a glimpse into the strategy around H.264 licensing and what the landscape might look like 5 years from now, assuming H.264 were baked into the web platform as a requirement. I’ll also talk about other options that might be coming in the near future that most people don’t know about.
The Web Exploded on Royalty-Free
The web has always been based on the assumption of Royalty Free. In fact, participation in a working group at the W3C requires that any parties disclose and make available any essential claims on the technology covered by that working group.
But that’s just a technicality. The truth is in the tests: you can still build a web browser, spider, client, web server, image editor, a JS library, a CSS library, an HTML editor, a web publishing system, commerce system – anything that is based on fundamental web technologies – without asking anyone for permission. This is a fundamental reason why the web has spread everywhere. Because everyone had the chance to add to the mix.
It’s worth saying twice. Anyone can create technology or services on the web and they don’t have to ask anyone for permission to do it. This is why we’ve had billions of dollars of investment and a fundamental shift in the way that western society acts and communicates – all in the course of a very short period of time. The web grew up on Royalty-Free.
Learning from GIF
The web in 1999 was a lot smaller than it is today, so a lot of people don’t remember what happened back when Unisys decided to start to enforce their GIF-related patents. GIF was already widely used on the web as a fundamental web technology. Much like the codecs we’re talking about today it wasn’t in any particular spec but thanks to network effects it was in use basically everywhere.
Unisys was asking some web site owners $5,000-$7,500 to able to use GIFs on their sites. Note that these patents expired about five years ago, so this isn’t an issue today, but it’s still instructive. It’s scary to think of a world where you would have to fork up $5000 just to be able to use images on a web site. Think about all of the opportunity, the weblogs, the search engines (even Google!) and all the other the simple ideas that became major services that would never have been started because of a huge tax being put on being able to use a fundamental web technology. It makes the web as a democratic technology distinctly un-democratic.
We’re looking at the same situation with H.264, except at a far larger scale.
So let’s talk about what makes a fundamental web technology, and how they should be licensed. First, the licensing. I think that Apple said it best:
After careful consideration of the draft patent policy, Apple believes that it is essential to continued interoperability and development of the Web that fundamental W3C standards be available on a royalty-free basis. In line with the W3C’s mission to “lead the Web to its full potential,” Apple supports a W3C patent policy with an immutable commitment to royalty-free licensing for fundamental Web standards. Apple offers this statement in support of its position.
(The post then goes on to talk about an opt-out mechanism for participating members.)
This leads to the obvious question: is the codec a fundamental web technology? The HTML5 working group argued and punted on the issue. Given that the standard is mum on the issue it falls to the actors in the market to determine what’s required to support HTML5. Given the state of online video today this basically boils down to one actor: Google.
Google has a near-monopoly in online video thanks to the ubiquity of Youtube. This means that they are the effective arbiter of codec choices for HTML5 video. If you want Youtube to work, you have to support whatever they are using. (Right now that’s Flash or a native Youtube app for mobile devices, but it’s clearly changing.) Let’s set up a strawman and say that it’s going to be H.264. (I’ll discuss later why I don’t think that this will be a requirement, but let’s say that it is.)
Their choice for H.264 had an immediate effect. It’s a signal to the market that it’s OK to start using H.264 as the main codec for HTML5 video. This is proven out by Vimeo’s HTML5 beta player launch. Vimeo is a secondary player, but were perfectly happy doing what Google did. The effects of that move have spread quickly and you can see it in people’s reactions: John Gruber getting angry at Mozilla as a result of Google’s actions, people on twitter claiming that we don’t support HTML5 at all because of Google’s use of a proprietary codec (Not true! Firefox actually leads in HTML5 support in a huge number of areas.) and Gizmodo’s choice comment: “Luckily, YouTube accounts for a hefty chunk of said architecture, their catalog is rendered in HTML5-friendly h.264 format.“ This is what network effects look like in real time.
So if you think that Google has settled on H.264 as the only codec they will support (unlikely) it would appear that they have set us up to have another GIF-like situation. Note that I think that this will not actually be the case, as I discuss later, but it’s worth thinking about as a framework. So instead let’s talk about what that situation would look like, with MP3 as the model for the H.264 licensing strategy.
Rising Costs and Unpredictable Licensing
So what can we learn about H.264’s licensing strategy as it pertains to pricing? Much like GIF we already have a model to look at that is already near the end of its cycle: MP3. Network effects and goverment-sponsored monopolies make a very powerful combination. But getting the most out of them requires a very specific strategy, one we saw with MP3 and we’re seeing again with H.264.
History is instructive. We know that MP3 was licensed quite liberally early in its lifespan. Before 2002, “no license fee is expected for desktop software mp3 decoders/players that are distributed free-of-charge via the Internet for personal use of end-users”. They changed that after the network effects had already taken their toll. Not only were decoders free for free software, but bulk flat rate licenses were available to large distributors. That’s how widely distributed software picked up with ability to play back MP3-encoded files.
But as the cycle continued and MP3 became a requirement for playback the pricing changed to where we are today. So let’s talk about what it looks 8 years later.
If you look at the public published rates for a couple of the MP3 licensors (and there are more than just two) someone who wanted to use it would be looking at a royalty rate of about $1/downloaded unit. So if you were doing, say, two million downloads a day you would be looking at about $2,000,000 per day just to have permission from those companies to include an MP3 decoder. Could you negotiate a lower rate? Probably. But that gives you a sense of the scale if you’re a small provider in a world where getting started on the web is hard and you don’t have much negotiating power.
People casually say that we should support licensed codecs like MP3, but they haven’t done the research. We have.
Much like MP3, H.264 is currently liberally licensed and also has a license that changes from year to year, depending on market conditions. This means that something that’s free today might not be free tomorrow. Like sending an H.264 file over the Internet.
In fact there are already royalties charged to some people using H.264 for streaming, according to Jan Ozer. Some quotes from that article:
Whenever I speak at industry groups about H.264, and detail the upcoming royalty obligation, some attendees are invariably surprised that using H.264 will generate royalties. Here’s what you need to know about H.264 and royalties, in an except from an article that I wrote for StreamingMedia.com [ed: full article here.]
…
When I spoke with Harkness, he stated that the patent group hadn’t yet decided the license provisions for internet broadcast, or even if there would be a license, though he conceded that it would make little sense for the patent group to forego this revenue. The only thing certain is that the royalty provisions must be announced by January 2010 for royalties that would be payable the following year.
OK. This paragraph hits all of the big points:
Remember, this is still very early in H.264’s history so the licensing is very friendly, just like it used to be for MP3. The companies who own the IP in these large patent pools aren’t in this for the fun of it – this is what they do. They patent and they enforce and then enjoy the royalties. If they are in a position to charge more, they will. We can expect that if we allow H.264 to become a fundamental web technology that we’ll see license requirements get more onerous and more expensive over time, with little recourse.
Selective Enforcement
One reason why a lot of this isn’t known is because patents can be selectively enforced. And because it’s still early in H.264’s lifespan it’s extremely advantageous to lightly enforce the patents in the patent pool. MP3 and GIF both prove that if you allow liberal licensing early in a technology’s lifespan, network effects create much more value down the road when you can change licenses to capture value created by delivering images and data in those formats. Basically wait for everyone to start using it and then make everyone pay down the road. (Three words: unpredictable business costs.)
The other problem is that the Internet, because of it’s global nature, hides many of these costs. Everyone – and I mean everyone – uses tools from parts of the world where there are no software patents to transcode and edit videos. (One of the world’s largest free software downloads after Firefox? VLC. 111M last time I checked.) This grey area for tools means that these heavily patented formats gain much of the same advantage as free formats – lots of free tools and tons of ad-hoc support from free software people – but with the ability to still enforce and monetize in parts of the world where patents are enforced. It’s actually a brilliant strategy, even though the outcome is that the true costs of patents are hidden from the view of most people.
So What Now?
Remember that my setup for this was that Google’s choice was going to be H.264-only and that their decision would have network effects on the web, setting up another GIF-like situation for the web.
But I, like many others, have reason to believe that H.264 will not be Google’s final choice. There’s good reason to believe this: they are purchasing On2. On2 has technologies that are supposed to be better than H.264. If Google owns the rights to those technologies they are very likely to use them on their properties to promote them and are also likely to license them in a web-friendly (i.e. royalty-free) fashion. Google actually has a decent history of doing this. In particular you can get a sense of this from their post on The meaning of open:
If there are existing standards for handling user data, then we should adhere to them. If a standard doesn’t exist, we should work to create an open one that benefits the entire web, even if a closed standard appears to be better for us (remember — it’s not!). In the meantime we need to do whatever we can to make leaving Google as easy as possible. Google is not the Hotel California — you can check out any time you like and you CAN, in fact, leave!
In this case they were talking about user data, not video formats. But it’s the same set of principles at work. It’s also very hard to imagine Google licensing proprietary codecs as a revenue stream. It just doesn’t align with how they have worked in the past.
So it’s very likely that Google will be using a codec that’s superior to H.264 in terms of bandwidth usage and will also have web-friendly licensing attached to it. I know that at Mozilla we would support that and would very likely incorporate that technology into our browser, much like we did with Theora and Vorbis.
In Summary
So that’s the case for supporting free formats and also describes why we should be avoiding H.264 as a fundamental web standard. We don’t want to set ourselves up with another GIF situation and set up licensing like MP3 where we’ll be dealing with increased costs and restrictions over time. Google is likely to support something other than H.264 on Youtube and we’re likely to end up with something that’s better on a royalty-free basis as a result. And as I mention below, Theora and Vorbis are still excellent alternatives even if they for some reason don’t do as we expect.
Mozilla and Firefox continue to stand with the web on this topic. We don’t think that fundamental web technologies should be encumbered with patents and our actions and messages reflect that. We hope that you will stand with us on this.
A Note About Theora and Vorbis
Many of you might notice that I haven’t talked much about Theora or Vorbis. In fact some of you might read this post as me throwing them under the bus. That couldn’t be further from the truth. What I’ve really been talking about is one part of a larger ecosystem. What the web is really asking for is a codec that is implemented everywhere, that competes well on quality and doesn’t come with GIF-like surprises. Theora and Vorbis fit every part of this bill. You can actually use them on all of the desktop browsers, either via native support or via a Java plugin that actually works pretty well.
On the quality side what we’ve been able to do at Mozilla, with the help of the rest of the Xiph community, is to show that even though Theora is based on older, royalty-free technology, most people can’t really tell the difference between a video encoded with a decent Theora encoder and a video encoded with H.264.
But given the situation with submarine patents it would actually be a good idea for us to have more than one royalty-free codec available for browser vendors, site owners and content publishers. That way if one of them turns out to have issues, you just turn one of them off and continue to use the other one That’s why I think that if Google did offer a new codec that it would make a wonderful addition to the list of codecs we could use on the web. And if they want to use it on Youtube and other Google sites, that’s great. But it’s good to have other options in the wings.
So this means that Theora and Vorbis aren’t going anywhere. There are other reasons to continue to support (and promote!) Theora and Vorbis as well:
So I wouldn’t expect these formats to go anywhere. Instead I would expect to see them implemented everywhere either as backups or to support existing content and streaming.
I’ve been posting recently about food and nutrition and I feel like the information in this video was a huge piece that I was missing.
In this video, Dr. Robert Lustig goes through the science behind how sugar and its component parts, glucose and fructose, are processed in the body and what that means for everything we know about the US’s (and the world’s, for that matter) ever growing waistline. This talk shows why all calories are not created equal.
Like many good things in this world, it’s a long story, packed with information so you will have to put aside time to absorb it. But it’s worth your time if you ever wanted to understand why sugar makes you feel the way that it does and why it specifically results in weight gain vs. other types of carbohydrates, fats or protein.
Watch it on YouTube if you don’t see a video above. Licensed as CC-BY-NC-ND.
Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. A day where we say thanks for all of the good things that we’ve been lucky enough to be graced with over the last year.
It’s also a day that we eat a lot of food.
Earlier today I watched this talk on Deep Agriculture given by Michael Pollan given at The Long Now foundation. He’s best known for his books which include The Omnivore’s Dilemma. This video is long, but worth listening to. It contains some absolutely fascinating anecdotes about our food system today and feels about right for the day when we celebrate the harvest.
Enjoy!
Michael Pollan: “Deep Agriculture”. Available under BY-NC-SA, copyright The Long Now Foundation.
Ahh, 2006. It seems like such a long time ago! Back then I was working at Red Hat on OLPC and Microsoft had just accused free software of being Unamerican and communist. It was a good time, honestly, to know that you were working on important things and that you were still able to rile up big companies into say foolish things. (Turns out that’s still pretty easy to do.)
I was talking with a co-worker here at Mozilla about the idea of connecting patent reform with the concept of what it means to be American. Many people who believe that software patents are a good thing often appeal to this idea. The cotton gin, apple pie and all that. But I was reminded of this talk by Eben Moglen that was given at the Red Hat summit where he talked about free software and patents in the context of the american experience. It’s still worth watching today.
Can’t view the video? Check out the original page and while you’re at it, get a friggin’ modern browser.
It’s earth day so I thought today might be a good day to post this. I’ve been sitting on a set of tabs in my browser for a long time now – months I think – and I think that it’s enough to be able to share with people.
Over the last few months I’ve been working hard to wrap my head around the issues of climate change and what it might take to be able to deal with it. As of late I’ve become a pretty data-driven person. That is, I want to have a decent amount of information about how to measure a problem, but also what it’s going to take to solve it. I thought that I might share what I’ve seen out there that’s really put things into perspective for me.
The Size of the Problem
I’m going to share three links here that I think underscore the scope and scale of the problem. The first two are from Stewart Brand, the last is quoted by Michael Parekh but is from another article. The assumptions that underlie this set are that:
So that being said, here are some links that I’ve used to understand the problem.
Quoting Stewart Brand:
The world currently runs on about 16 terawatts (trillion watts) of energy, most of it burning fossil fuels. To level off at 450 ppm of carbon dioxide, we will have to reduce the fossil fuel burning to 3 terawatts and produce all the rest with renewable energy, and we have to do it in 25 years or it’s too late. Currently about half a terrawatt comes from clean hydropower and one terrawatt from clean nuclear. That leaves 11.5 terawatts to generate from new clean sources.
…
“Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (That’s about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) Two terawatts of solar thermal? If it’s 30 percent efficient all told, we’ll need 50 square meters of highly reflective mirrors every second. (Some 600 square miles a year, times 25.) Half a terawatt of biofuels? Something like one Olympic swimming pools of genetically engineered algae, installed every second. (About 15,250 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of wind? That’s a 300-foot-diameter wind turbine every 5 minutes. (Install 105,000 turbines a year in good wind locations, times 25.) Two terawatts of geothermal? Build 3 100-megawatt steam turbines every day-1,095 a year, times 25. Three terawatts of new nuclear? That’s a 3-reactor, 3-gigawatt plant every week-52 a year, times 25.”
In other words, the land area dedicated to renewable energy (“Renewistan”) would occupy a space about the size of Australia to keep the carbon dioxide level at 450 ppm. To get to Hanson’s goal of 350 ppm of carbon dioxide, fossil fuel burning would have to be cut to ZERO, which means another 3 terawatts would have to come from renewables, expanding the size of Renewistan further by 26 percent.
Reading the whole mail is important and eye-opening. You should do it. I think that this message alone puts into perspective the sheer mind-numbing amount of work that has to happen to be able to effectively protect our planet from ourselves. When I hear about eight or even fifty billion dollars aside to help with these problems I chuckle. Because it’s only a small portion of the amount of our own efforts that’s required to be able to make steady progress against this growing problem. More on that in the “Making it Personal” section below.
2. Climate Change, Recalculated
This is a pretty long presentation, but thumbing through it is worth your time. He goes into talking about the basics of energy, what a “watt” is, etc. It’s a pretty important concept for everyone to understand – not just because they need to be able to measure their own energy footprint, but also how various technologies offset that footprint.
He also takes the time to talk about the scale required to solve the problem. Talking about the US industrial output, what it was during WWII and how that might relate to us starting down the path to fix it. You should take the time to thumb through this – slowly. It will really alter your perspective.
3. Michael Parekh on “The Hummer of Food”
The livestock sector is estimated to account for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and beef is the biggest culprit.
Even though beef only accounts for 30 percent of meat consumption in the developed world it’s responsible for 78 percent of the emissions, Pelletier said Sunday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
That’s because a single kilogram of beef produces 16 kilograms carbon dioxide equivalent emissions: four times higher than pork and more than ten times as much as a kilogram of poultry, Pelletier said.
So yeah, I guess the lesson here is eat less beef. It’s a pretty simple idea, too. I just thought that pointing out that even small changes in lifestyle can still have a pretty big impact on the world – if we all do it.
Making it Personal
So by now you’ve spent the time to read through this and you have a better sense of both what it’s going to take to fix the problem but you don’t have a sense of what it takes to start making a difference in your daily life. My suggestion? Wander over to WattzOn and start building your own energy profile.
They have compiled a huge database of products, services and personal action and how those things translate into your energy footprint. For example, building a car requires a huge amount of energy so if you own one that should be counted in your energy footprint. If you replace your car every 6 years instead of every 3, that saves energy. Where you live and how you get to work affects it. And of course, the stuff that’s pretty easy to measure – home heating and electricity. All of that is collected together and you can create a profile. I did this and it was pretty eye-opening.
Here’s my profile as an example:
As you can see it turns out that since I work at home I have almost no commuting cost but it turns out that my flying around the world lifestyle accounts for nearly half of my wattage. Also it turns out that heat and electricity only make up a small amount of my footprint. I was not expecting this when I started the process, which is why I encourage everyone to do it themselves. It also means that I understand how much turning off a lightbulb means in the grant scheme of things and what an incandescent (100W) vs. an energy-saving bulb (20W) really means – not much, but enough to encourage me to do it anyway.
So how much would it cost to offset that footprint with clean energy?
So let’s talk about that roughly 10,000 watt lifestyle – what does it mean? What would it take for me to offset it? I sat down and figured out that I would have to purchase a whopping $275,000 in solar panels (installation not included!) to offset 10,000 watts. Not a small amount of money.
Yes, it’s a strange way to measure it and it doesn’t map to things like air travel but it puts a dollar value on clean generation to drive my daily life. But it takes my personal footprint and makes me understand the amount that I would have to invest to offset it. And it lets me put a dollar value in my head on the value of saving energy through lifestyle changes.
So it’s earth day. Why not sit down and figure out what it’s going to take for you to make the earth a better place?
I’m going to list five little writing resources that I’ve found to be useful over the last few months. Many of you have probably seen many of them, but I thought it would be useful to put them all in one place.
1. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Outstanding TEDtalk on John’s weblog. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about the creative process, suffering and her thoughts on a better way of dealing with both the successes and failures in writing. It’s funny, honest and you can tell that this is something she’s lived through.
2. Joss Whedon’s Top 10 Writing Tips. Buffy, Firefly, all that joy. It’s a quick list and I find myself going back to it for ideas on how to make changes or make something more interesting and approachable. Worth bookmarking for sure.
3. Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction. Ever try and write something while you’re connected to the Internet? Yeah, it’s basically impossible. He doesn’t suggest that you give up connectivity but offers up a bunch of different ways to mitigate the pain and turn it into an advantage. (Not that I use this – I do my best thinking + writing when I’m trapped on an airplane. But still.)
4. Eric Idle, on John Cleese’s Writing Process. A quick two minutes on writing with John Cleese. Funny, and somewhat useful. Specificity vs. big picture. A fun video that puts great pictures in your head of what it might be like to work with John Cleese. Mostly here just to spice things up a bit.
5. A Transom Interview with Ira Glass. (Also, part 2 and part 3.) If you made it this far into this post you’re probably willing to invest some time into reading through this interview. Ira Glass is one of the main forces behind This American Life which includes some of the best story telling I’ve heard in my young life. And it’s the best of this small lot of resources. Ira talks about learning how to create radio shows, finding the heart of stories, learning from other people and also what not to do. These are long and include some great audio samples and is worth your time to go through it. Lots of good thought and inspiration here.
Enjoy!
[ 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:
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.
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.
interesting stuff