We're talking in circles James so I'll just leave it with all my comments below. Even in the comments of the Cisco thread listed above the discussion of their solution vs. WebM - VP8/9 codec is lively.
WebM for IE is not an extension. I shouldn't have used that word. WebM for IE. It is simply an additional capability that allows IE to "open the window" and allow VP8/9 to pass through. It is not a decoding engine.
Regarding Apple, Cisco's blog openly discusses that right now it is only for the open source Firefox browswer so it will do you no more good than WebM would for Safari. And for the record, Firefox threw their support behind WebM two years ago and has been a major part of its open source evolution which is why Firefox has full support for it for over two years.
We are transcoding for the reasons I describe in my comments below. It allows dynamic resolution scaling which has huge benefit in optimizing for varying bandwidth connections.
And lastly, as I discuss below, Cisco's own PR person has acknowledged that commercial applications of their technology are still bound by the MPEG-LA royalty licensing once the distribution reaches greater than 100,000 installs with the limitless cap still requiring the $6,500,000 royalty license.
To me this whole thing sounds like Cisco's attempt to stay relevant in a web space that is rapidly trending towards open source, open standards, open licensing. I'd recommend reading all of the comments on that blog post as well. They are highly enlightening regarding the limitations of what they are doing.
Nadee Gunasena October 31, 2013 at 9:36 am