Web Video Wars: Apple and Microsoft Team Up to Kill Off Firefox and Opera

In a Web-centric world, control the browser and you control the customer. Microsoft (MSFT) browser market share dominance has steadily shrunk and Apple (AAPL) Safari has never been a dominant browser on any non-Apple platform. However, both companies have moved in concert to push some other popular browsers out of the way. Their weapon of choice? Video.

Video has proven to be one of the biggest interests that consumers have in the Internet. To be compatible with web sites, browsers must support the video technology they use. My colleague Chris Dannen noted last week that there's a current fight over web video standards, and consumers may well be the losers. The problem traces back to how companies want to use browser technology standards to rule the Web.

Adobe (ADBE) Flash has historically been a major choice for delivering video. However, Flash depends on browser plug-ins and so leaves control in Adobe's hands. This explains much of Apple's antagonism to the company, supposed technical concerns aside. Apple's business strategy demands control over all parts of a product ecosystem, whether hardware design, third party software availability, or content.

Flash delivers one aspect of video technology. HTML 5 will likely supplant it over time. However, there is another vital aspect of video delivery: how sites and browsers compress and uncompress it. Both Apple and Microsoft are pushing a video compression standard called H.264. Although an open standard, the patented technology behind it costs $5 million for a license.

Mozilla, which makes the popular Firefox browser, and Opera, with a browser by the same name, support a free compression format called Ogg Theora. Google (GOOG) Chrome supports both Ogg and H.264.

Firefox has nearly 25 percent market share, and Microsoft would clearly love to put an end to that. At the same time, an iPhone version of Opera claimed a million downloads within a few days of Apple approval of the app last month. I called the approval a PR move, because Opera clearly duplicated functions of Apple's software, and that's supposed to be enough to get the company to turn down an app. But what does it matter when you're trying to negotiate standards effectively to cut a competitor out of the loop?

Neither Mozilla nor Opera has the free cash for such a license fee, so if H.264 became the standard, it would effectively push them out of a competitive position. Furthermore, both Apple and Microsoft seem involved in an attempt to drive Ogg Theora off the market through legal action. Last week came news that Apple CEO Steve Jobs referred to an effort to develop a pool of patents to "go after" Ogg. Free software activist Hugo Roy claims that Jobs responded to his open letter (with an email header that looks authentic) with the following:

All video codecs [compression and decompression software] are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other "open source" codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn't mean or guarantee that it doesn't infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.

Other codecs often come up in these discussions. The distinction between the availability of source code and the ownership of the intellectual property in that available source code is critical. Today, intellectual property rights for H.264 are broadly available through a well-defined program managed by MPEG LA. The rights to other codecs are often less clear, as has been described in the press. Of course, developers can rely on the H.264 codec and hardware acceleration support of the underlying operating system, like Windows 7, without paying any additional royalty.

Scope site image: Captaindan, public domain.