On2 Technologies

» see on2.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I learned this company backwards. WebM first, because it turned up in 2010 as Google's answer to the H.264 licensing question. Then VP8 underneath it, then the fact that VP8 had come from a company Google bought, and only at the end that the company was eighteen years old and had originally been called The Duck Corporation. By the time I knew the name it had already been taken off everything.

Duck was founded in New York City in 1992 by Daniel B. Miller with Victor Yurkovsky and Stan Marder, at a moment when playing video on a personal computer was an achievement rather than a feature. Their codec was TrueMotion, and anybody who played CD-ROM games in the nineties watched TrueMotion footage without ever being told. Full-motion video was the selling point of the whole format and somebody had to make it fit on the disc.

In 1999 the company merged into a shell called Applied Capital Funding, renamed itself On2 and started trading on the American Stock Exchange under ONT. That is the dot-com era behaving exactly as expected, but the engineering carried on unchanged: a small team in Clifton Park, New York, shipping a new video codec every year or two and licensing it to whoever needed video to move down a line too thin to carry it.

This is roughly my field now. I work on vision systems that run on hardware with no room to spare, which is the same problem stated from the other direction. Arriving at On2 late and from the wrong end taught me something I would not have picked up reading the story in order. The codec companies were never famous, and the reason nobody knew their names is that they were doing the job properly.

~ the dossier ~

~ the theora donation ~

VP3 shipped in June 2000. In late 2001 On2 released it as open source along with an irrevocable royalty-free grant covering any patent claims it might have held, and in June 2002 handed the whole thing to the Xiph.Org Foundation, which renamed it Theora.

That is an extraordinary thing for a public company to do with an asset, and the reasoning was strategic rather than generous. A free baseline codec that anyone could ship undercut the license fees On2's competitors were collecting, while On2 went on selling the newer versions that were actually better. Theora became the codec the free software world ran on for a decade, the one that shipped in browsers because nothing patented could.

~ inside everything ~

VP6 was announced in May 2003 and Macromedia picked it for Flash Video the following year. That decision is the reason On2 mattered. From 2005 onward, when web video meant a Flash player embedded in a page, an enormous share of everything anybody watched on the internet was being decoded by On2 code inside a plugin from a different company, with neither name visible anywhere on screen.

VP7 arrived in early 2005 and Skype put it into the client on 1 December that year, so video calling ran on it too. In November 2007 On2 bought Hantro Products in Finland, which built hardware video decoders for mobile chips, and that is how the same lineage ended up inside phones. None of it ever produced a consumer brand. On2 was a component supplier and its customers put their own names on the box.

~ the acquisition ~

Google offered $106.5 million in stock on 5 August 2009. Shareholders complained it was too low, the offer went up to $133.9 million in January 2010, and the deal closed on 19 February at a final value of about $124.6 million. What Google wanted was VP8, published in 2008 and the first On2 codec good enough to argue with H.264 on quality.

On 19 May 2010 Google open sourced VP8 and launched WebM. The products On2 had been selling were discontinued, the licensing business ended, and the name came off everything. Eighteen years of codec work went into a format Google gave away in order to remove a licensing problem from the web, which is either the best or the worst possible outcome depending on whether you were holding shares or writing a browser.

~ what is left ~

VP9 followed in 2013 and AV1 in 2018, and the line from TrueMotion under a CD-ROM cutscene to whatever is decoding a 4K stream on your television tonight is unbroken. There is no On2 branding anywhere on it.

Two small artifacts survive. Google held the duck.com domain for years because Duck had owned it, and handed it over to DuckDuckGo in December 2018 after a long argument about whose name it was. And on2.com still resolves, still says On2 Technologies across the top, still served off Google's own infrastructure, a page nobody has had any reason to open since 2010.

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