• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, April 7, 2015

For the last year or so, YouTube's engineers tell us, many YouTube videos you’ve been seeing have been delivered to you via a new codec, VP9, that cuts the video size in half and improves the quality of the picture.

While all of that sounds good all by itself, it’s also an important survival tool for anybody connected to streaming video. Cisco reported last year that worldwide, IP video traffic will be 79% of all consumer Internet traffic by 2018, which oddly becomes less jaw dropping when you find out it was already 66% in 2013. So spooning all that stuff was bound to get more difficult.

So compress away.

“VP9 is the most efficient video compression codec in widespread use today,” the YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog stated yesterday, in such an easy understand explanation of VP9 it must have been severely dumbed down for the likes of me. The blog continues: “In the last year alone, YouTube users have already watched more than 25 billion hours of VP9 video, billions of which would not have been played in HD without VP9's bandwidth benefits.”

There is so much video out there--and Meerkat and Periscope might cause an even more giant expansion--that something has to give. It might eventually be your data plan, if providers start becoming a lot more aggressive about charging for it. But right now, VP9 saves space and improves quality.

“This new format bumps everybody one notch closer to our goal of instant, high-quality, buffer-free videos,” the blog says. “That means that if your Internet connection used to only play up to 480p without buffering on YouTube, it can now play silky smooth 720p with VP9.”

“You don’t need a stats degree to see why that’s important,” writes Gizmodo. “Over half of Internet traffic is video; if you can cut the file-size of those videos in half, you decrease total Internet traffic by a quarter. You’d have to string a helluva lot of fiber-optic to get the same kind of improvement overnight.”

An interesting and ultimately complex battle brought VP9 to the (free, open source) market.  A couple years ago, at the WebRTC conference in Santa Clara, Calif., programmers battled it out. One side, including Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, fought for V8 and V9 open source codecs. “The powers behind Safari and Internet Explorer- you know who they are– remain major holdouts,” reported the Web site Business2Community.com back in 2013.

Google is apparently already working on the successor to VP9, but right now, its blog reports, “VP9 decoding support is available today in the Chrome Web browser, in Android devices like the Samsung Galaxy S6, and in TVs and game consoles from Sony, LG, Sharp, and more. More than 20 device partners across the industry are launching products in 2015 and beyond using VP9.”

The South African video news site HTXT. africa also points out VP9 might be nice to have around as the picture gets better, noting “this far more efficient codec makes streaming uninterrupted 4K videos over the Internet a lot smoother, great news for anyone interested in watching super high-resolution videos regularly without upgrading to a fiber connection.”

pj@mediapost.com