Today, May 19^th, may just be a historic day.  Not in the same way the printing press, the steam engine or VE-day were, but in a more geeky, technology way.  In fact, you probably won’t even see this story on CNN or MSNBC.  You may not have even known this event happened today unless you frequent sites like Slashdot, TechCrunch or Digg.  What is this big news?  The WebM project, a royalty-free, open source video codec released today by Google.

You see, there is this thing called a patent… we all know what patents are so I’ll skip a bit.  Patents make the business world go round.  They are good for profits and jobs, bad for small businesses and hobbyists who can’t afford to pay royalties and licensing fees which affect a large chunk of the Internet.  One of the heaviest patented software applications are video codecs, and while the Internet has been relatively royalty free when video comes into play it won’t stay that way forever.

Enter “do no harm” Google.  Last year they bought On2 who makes a video codec called VP8.  Today Google has announced the WebM Project which does two things: 1. It makes VP8 an open source community project, and 2. It allows everyone to use it royalty-free.

http://www.webmproject.org

WebM is not the first open source video codec project that is both open source and royalty free.  That honor may go to Theora (http://www.theora.org) but VP8, unlike Theora, uses a more modern approach, owns patents to protect it from lawsuits and is backed by the mighty Google.  Steve Jobs has already laid down a threat against Theora, claiming that a patent pool is being formed to squish it, which, if true, would make VP8 even more important as the only free, open video compression codec that will be safe to use.

Why is this so important?  The answer is HTML5 and the new <video> tag.  To display video right now you need a plugin like Adobe Flash, Windows Media Player, or Apple QuickTime.  With the video tag all you need is a browser that supports HTML5 and the source video to uses a HTML5 supported codec.  At this time there is no one video codec standard for HTML5 which leaves it up to the site and browser makers to decide which codecs to support.  Having a free option really changes the game.

So far Opera, Chrome, Firefox, and, surprisingly, Internet Explorer 9 (announced today) will support VP8 with HTML5.  That leaves Apple’s Safari as the only major browser that does not plan VP8 support, but will instead only support H.264 at this time.  As a side note, IE9 will support H.264 as well as VP8, while Firefox, Opera and I believe Chrome already have support for Theora’s video codec.

While the release of VP8 is not so momentous that your grandchildren will be privileged enough to sleep through this day in history class, it is a big deal for those who live and breathe on the internet.  YouTube, being owned by Google, will likely lead the VP8 charge on the internet.  No doubt other sites will follow suite, free is always a good motivation, which could make VP8 the next big thing on the internet.