What Is VP9?
This is another installment in our series of What Is.? articles, designed to offer definitions, history, and context around significant terms and issues in the online video industry.
VP9 is an open-source codec from Google that was developed from technology acquired from On2 Technologies in February 2010 for an estimated $124.6 million. The first codec Google released from this acquisition was VP8, which was paired with the Vorbis audio codec in the WebM file structure. VP9 is the next iteration of the codec, which became available on June 17, 2013. VP9 will be the last VPx-based codec released by Google, as the company contributed all codec technology to the Alliance for Open Media in September 2015.