Today, Google I/O 2013‘s schedules were out to the public and here’s an interesting session for the developers at IO. The company is all set to talk about the new VP9 Open Video Codec, which will allow the websites to stream video content in a very low bandwidth.
Now, this is much needed for the developing countries and also for a majority of the internet users who are on mobile streaming videos. This year’s IO schedule suggests that they’re going to be talking about the VP9 video codec, which would stream videos in better quality, and would consume very less bandwidth.
And Google has also noted that the codec is royalty free and is completely open. The session, which is handled by Ronald Bultje, has the description as follows:
According to Cisco, video data will be 55 percent of all consumer Internet traffic by 2016. With that much data traversing networks, efficient video compression will be more important than ever, especially on mobile networks. We are very excited about the new VP9 codec, which delivers better video quality at lower data rates than competing technologies. Furthermore, VP9 was developed entirely in the open as a royalty-free technology. In this session you will learn how VP9 performs against H.264 and other other codecs in quality and decoding speed, how to create WebM videos with VP9 and the new Opus audio codec, and how to deploy VP9 content to Chrome users in HTML5
While the speculation of Google talking about this technology started last year, looks like YouTube would be adopting this technology post IO or even later than that. It is also worthy to note that the VP9 technology was under Beta testing for a long time, and Google was involved in developing and testing the codec.
I’m planning to attend this session, and also, interestingly, there are some sessions on Google Glass too, which is NOT restricted to the Google Glass Explorers.