VP8 is Google's first open-source video codec, released in 2010 after Google acquired On2 Technologies for $134 million specifically to free the technology and make it royalty-free. VP8 was the first credible attempt at a patent-free alternative to H.264, and for a few years it powered the bulk of the web's first generation of low-latency real-time video — WebRTC video calls, Skype, early Hangouts, Google Talk.
Technically VP8 is roughly equivalent to H.264 baseline profile in compression efficiency — competitive when it shipped, but never significantly better than the codec it tried to replace. Where it mattered most was political and commercial: by handing the world a royalty-free codec, Google demonstrated that a major player could fund video codec development as infrastructure rather than as a patent revenue stream. That argument set up the political alignment that eventually produced VP9, then AV1, then AV2.
For a product team in 2026, VP8 is almost entirely legacy. WebRTC implementations still use VP8 as a fallback because it's universally supported in browsers and the encoding is cheap, but new WebRTC deployments default to VP9 or AV1 when both endpoints support them. Outside real-time communications, VP8 is gone from streaming pipelines — YouTube replaced it with VP9 around 2013, and HEVC/AV1 have eclipsed both for VOD. If you encounter VP8 in a project today, it's almost certainly because of a legacy WebRTC stack; the modern replacement is AV1 for new infrastructure and VP9 as the safe compatible middle ground.
