"We believe that the WebRTC effort represents an unprecedented opportunity to establish a new real-time communications platform," wrote Justin Uberti, Google's tech lead for , on the . "Therefore, we believe the sole mandatory-to-implement video codec in WebRTC should be VP8, the only viable royalty-free option."

Google acquired and open sourced the , which is used to compress and decompress video streams, when it purchased On2 in 2010.

Started in 2011, (Web Real-Time Communication) started authoring a pending HTML5 standard, as well as an accompanying open source framework, for running real-time communications across the Internet, such as telephone calls, video share and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. Today, such services require the provider to create the capability from scratch, or borrow from commercial solutions.

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) are collaborating on the effort.