Google Buys On2

Google is going to purchase video technology company On2 for $106.5 million.

On2 Technologies (AMEX: ONT), formerly known as The Duck Corporation, is a small publicly-traded company (on the American Stock Exchange), headquartered in Clifton Park, New York that designs video codec technology.

Some of its codec designs are known as VP3-First version in this Open source technology which first relaesed in Late 2001, later followed by VP4, VP5, TrueMotion VP6 - which was used as Macromedia Flash 8 video codec ((VP5 and VP6-used in a Chinese-developed competitor to the DVD format called the EVD (Enhanced Versatile Disc) format) , TrueMotion VP7 (superior to the recent H.264/AVC standard, based on claims of comparative technical capabilities and licensing costs) and VP8 (uses about 40% less data than the open format H.264 video).


By using VP8 technology owned by On2 help google in saving huge amount of bandwidth on the Google-owned YouTube, which serves up millions of videos every single day.