VP9 is the next level in video compression and can help you to save up to 50% on your CDN costs, or significantly increase the quality of your streams.
We are happy to announce the introduction of full VP9 support for our HTML5 video player and our video encoder, both in the cloud as well as for containerized deployments that can run on-premise or in your own cloud account with Docker and Kubernetes. VP9 has recently gained popularity as there is still an uncertain royalty situation with HEVC which is the main competitor for VP9. Similar to HEVC, VP9 can perform up to 50% better, as a compression format, than H.264/AVC, especially for UHD or 4K resolutions. This results in higher quality video that can be delivered to the users, or help saving on bandwidth and thus reduce CDN costs by up to 50%!
VP9 is a royalty free codec that is developed by Google as an alternative to the commercial video formats. YouTube has been successfully using VP9 to deliver video content to their users for several years already and claims to deliver the same quality at half the bandwidth used by H.264/AVC. This is why YouTube prefers to stream VP9 on browsers/devices that have support for it, delivering better quality with less bandwidth. When streaming UHD and 4K content, VP9 is getting even more efficient. YouTube has chosen to deliver 4K resolutions only with VP9 and thus locking out Safari users to consume 4K content via YouTube.
This rise in popularity of VP9 is not only caused by the uncertain situation with the HEVC royalties, but also because of the ongoing development of AV1, a royalty-free video coding format developed by the Alliance for Open Media, which can basically be seen as a successor of VP9.
Looking at the range of supported browsers, VP9 is well ahead of HEVC. As of early 2017, VP9 is supported by roughly 75% of the browser market. This includes Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and also Microsoft Edge since summer 2016. On the other hand, HEVC is only supported in Microsoft Edge in cases where hardware decoding is available.
The Bitmovin encoder produces segmented VP9, which is perfectly suited for VoD streams as well as live streams. Furthermore our Live-to-VoD workflow fits perfectly with this format and allows you to generate VoD streams out of the live stream right after the stream has finished or even while the live stream is still running.