On2 Technologies has launched its latest video compression format,
On2 VP8. This eighth generation of On2 video is designed as a
solution for web TV, IPTV and video conferencing companies looking to
differentiate their product and service offerings by delivering
higher quality video using less data and requiring less system
resource for playback, according to Eero Kaikkonen, chief marketing
officer at On2.
“Downloading and streaming HD movies and TV shows has become
commonplace, and with affordable HD web cams, we’ll see rapid growth
in high-resolution user-generated content as well as the wide-scale
adoption of high quality video communication solutions,” he says.
“Even with faster transport technologies on the way, the cost and
availability of bandwidth will remain a stubborn obstacle to
containing costs as video services use more bandwidth than any other
IP application.”

According to a recent white paper published by Cisco, annual IP
traffic will exceed half a zettabyte by 2012, with video accounting
for close to 90 percent of all consumer traffic. Internet video alone
is expected to generate 10 exabytes of data per month in 2012.

Kaikkonen says On2 VP8 surpasses the compression efficiency and
performance of every other video format on the market by employing
over 40 technical innovations, among them: advanced prediction
through constructed reference frames; macroblock row level threading;
improved small area referential encoding; advanced contextual entropy
coding without the added complexity of bit level adaptability; and
sparse targeted adaptive loop filtering.

“With On2 VP8, we set out to increase compression performance over
On2 VP7 and leading H.264 implementations by 20 percent while
reducing playback complexity by 40 percent,” asys Paul Wilkins, chief
technology officer at On2. “In the end we exceeded these goals and
even back-ported some of what we learned to our On2 VP6 for Adobe
Flash encoders.”

On2 video is proprietary to On2 Technologies and is available with
patent-pool free licensing, avoiding the burdensome royalties
associated with standards based formats. For more information on On2
Video visit http://www.on2.com