Chromium Blog: video

Chromium Blog

News and developments from the open source browser project

Celebrating 10 years of WebM and WebRTC

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Ten years ago, Google planted the seeds for two foundational web media technologies, hoping they would provide the roots for a more vibrant internet. Two acquisitions, On2 Technologies and Global IP Solutions, led to a pair of open source projects: the WebM Project, a family of cutting edge video compression technologies (codecs) offered by Google royalty-free, and the WebRTC Project building APIs for real-time voice and video communication on the web.
These initiatives were major technical endeavors, essential infrastructure for enabling the promise of HTML5 with support for video conferencing and streaming. But this was also a philosophical evolution for media as Product Manager Mike Jazayeri noted in his blog post hailing the launch of the WebM Project:
“A key factor in the web’s success is that its core technologies such as HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP, etc. are open and freely implementable.”
As emerging first-class participants in the web experience, media and communication components also had to be free and open.
A decade later, these principles have ensured compression and communication technologies capable of keeping pace with a web ecosystem characterized by exponential growth of media consumption, devices, and demand. Starting from VP8 in 2010, the WebM Project has delivered up to 50% video bitrate savings with VP9 in 2013 and an additional 30% with AV1 in 2018 - with adoption by YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, Twitch, and more. Equally importantly, the WebM team co-founded the Alliance for Open Media which has freely licensed the IP of over 40 major tech companies in support of open and free codecs. With Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari supporting WebRTC, more than 85% of all installed browsers globally have become a client for real-time communications on the Internet. WebRTC has become a stable standard and it is now the default solution for video calling on the Web. These technologies have succeeded together, as today over 90% of encoded WebRTC video in Chrome uses VP8 or VP9.
The need for these technologies has been highlighted by COVID-19, as people across the globe have found new ways to work, educate, and connect with loved ones via video chat. The compression of open codecs has been essential to keeping services running on limited bandwidth, with over a billion hours of VP9 and AV1 content viewed every day. WebRTC has allowed for an ecosystem of interoperable communications apps to flourish: since the beginning of March 2020, we have seen in Chrome a 13X increase in received video streams via WebRTC.
These successes would not have been possible without all the supporters that make an open source community. Thank you to all the code contributors, testers, bug filers, and corporate partners who helped make this ecosystem a reality. A decade in, Google remains as committed as ever to open media on the web. We look forward to continuing that work with all of you in the next decade and beyond.
Posted by Matt Frost, Product Director Chrome Media and Niklas Blum, Senior Product Manager WebRTC

Google

Labels: video , WebM , webrtc

Videos with fewer intrusive ads

Wednesday, February 5, 2020

Chrome has always focused on creating the best possible experience for people browsing the web. We have a long history of protecting our users from annoying and harmful experiences—like blocking pop-up windows and warning users if a page has malware. For the last few years, we’ve worked to address a common complaint among Chrome users: annoying, intrusive ads. In 2018, we started removing the ads from websites that continually show intrusive ads that violate industry standards. Google also updated our own advertising offerings to ensure that we’re not selling or serving the kinds of ads that Internet users find the most annoying. Since then, we’ve seen ad blocking rates in North America and Europe drop significantly in Chrome. In order to determine which ads are the most intrusive to web experience, we rely on the Better Ads Standards which give companies like Google guidance based on feedback from people around the world. Today, the group responsible for developing the Better Ads Standards, the Coalition for Better Ads, announced a new set of standards for ads that show during video content, based on research from 45,000 consumers worldwide. There are many different types of ads that can run before, during, or after a video but according to the Coalition’s research, there are three ad experiences that people find to be particularly disruptive on video content that is less than 8 minutes long:

Image Source: Coalition for Better Ads
Long, non-skippable pre-roll ads or groups of ads longer than 31 seconds that appear before a video and that cannot be skipped within the first 5 seconds.

Image Source: Coalition for Better Ads
Mid-roll ads of any duration that appear in the middle of a video, interrupting the user’s experience.

Image Source: Coalition for Better Ads
Image or text ads that appear on top of a playing video and are in the middle 1/3 of the video player window or cover more than 20 percent of the video content.
Does this affect my video content? The Coalition has announced that website owners should stop showing these ads to their site visitors in the next four months. Following the Coalition’s lead, beginning August 5, 2020, Chrome will expand its user protections and stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly show these disruptive ads. It’s important to note that YouTube.com, like other websites with video content, will be reviewed for compliance with the Standards. Similar to the previous Better Ads Standards, we’ll update our product plans across our ad platforms, including YouTube, as a result of this standard, and leverage the research as a tool to help guide product development in the future. If you operate a website that shows ads, you should consider reviewing your site status in the Ad Experience Report, a tool that helps publishers to understand if Chrome has identified any violating ad experiences on your site. Starting this week, we’ll update the Ad Experience Report with information to help publishers resolve any issues with these new video standards currently on their site. For more information about this process, you can reference the Help Center and Community Forum.
Posted by Jason James, Product Manager