This morning Google announced it was spending $106 million in stock to buy On2, a maker of audio and video compression software.  The very logical question I don’t hear being asked, though, is why would Google spend money for something it is already getting pretty much for free?  It’s to turn yet another partner into a competitor, this time Adobe Systems.

Google already uses On2 codecs in Adobe’s Flash video, which is the very heart of its YouTube video streaming service.  On2 powers YouTube’s so-called High Quality or HQ service, which due to competitive pressures on YouTube is likely to soon become YouTube’s standard codec.

It is important to remember that Flash video was not a significant […]