Now, however, we have an online video technology that anyone is free to use, study, improve, and distribute without needing permission or paying fees. This technology is called Ogg Theora (or just 'Theora'). Some parts of Theora are patented, but the owners of those patents have granted a permanent, irrevocable, royalty-free patent license to everyone. Theora carefully avoids any patents held by traditional patent holders: to get around the ridiculous patent of image storing mentioned above, Theora stores video image information from bottom to top instead of top to bottom!

Recognizing that Theora is a crucial ingredient for the freedom of our internet, Mozilla, Opera and Google have announced support of Theora video for future or current releases of their browsers. This means that millions of users will be able to watch Theora videos using their browser, without the need for extra software. The work of the free software community, with support from Mozilla, Wikipedia and others, has brought Theora to the same level of quality as state-of-the-art video technologies

2009 was a great year for Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora, with the HTML 5 audio and video tags gaining support in browsers, and dailymotion.com converting 300,000 videos to Theora. Make no mistake: Theora is a valid alternative to Flash and h.264, and with support for audio and video tags by browsers requires no plugins to work.

Looking forward to an even better year for Ogg in 2010!