Price: $133 million
Announced: August 2009
FTC Approval: January 2010
On2 Technologies made Theora and VP8, high performance video codecs for online streaming. After the purchase, the Free Software Foundation immediately called for Google to open-source VP8. It had used Adobe Flash for the videos on another notable acquisition -- YouTube.
On2's purchase has proven crucial to Google's video efforts. Google did open-source VP8 that May as a crucial piece of its video format, WebM. YouTube is switching over to WebM for both new videos and its existing catalog, while Google's rival Microsoft has allowed its own new acquisition, Skype, to switch to WebM for all its video calls.
Price: $150 million
Announced: December 2010
FTC Approval: No approval required
WideVine was a video optimizer and one of the last major independent digital rights managers. Fortune's own Dan Primack reported in February that the company had seriously overpaid given an internal valuation of between $30 or $40 million, according to a WideVine investor. (Google said it could not confirm numbers on acquisitions for which it has not publicly released details.)
Whatever the price, industry experts saw the purchase of WideVine as part of the company's continued investment in Google TV since the DRM tech acquired through WideVine could assuage future licensing concerns over the service. As an anti-piracy stalwart, WideVine's DRM operations also open up the potential for premium (read: paid) content on YouTube. As with On2, one acquisition fed directly into another.
