Just when we all started to think that the video industry was beginning to move towards standardization around H.264, Qualcomm announced that it has licensed the DivX codec technology and will support it in a range of video-enabled chipsets for CDMA mobile devices, ahead of Adobe’s Flash Video. As Peter White of Rethink Research writes, “if Qualcomm stays solely with DivX, then it will mean that the worlds of CDMA and WCDMA telephony will have diverged, and that web sites that can provide video to one type of handset will not be able to be played on another.”

In the Flash vs. Silverlight camp, Bradley Werner concludes that with the addition of Silverlight, Microsoft’s VC-1 video codec is rapidly moving into a position of parity with Adobe’s Flash Media Player and both technologies are in good positions to win in the market. Neal Page over at Inlet concurs.

So are these signs that the industry is in a position yet to move toward a set of codec standards? Will it happen soon? To both these counts, the answer is probably not.

In the recent IDC whitepaper Internet and Mobile Video: Transcoding the Long Tail, IDC estimates that there are close to 100 different types of Internet and mobile video files that the market is currently supporting. This is good news for RipCode because the greater the number of video formats and associated increased complexities means more business. However, because it takes a lot of time and development cycles to successfully support the multiple flavors of codecs on the market even we would like to see some degree of consolidation. However, given the slim chance of this happening anytime soon, we’ll continue to take our cues from our customers (video aggregators, user generated content sites, mobile & internet TV providers, etc.) and drive our development to support their codec requirements. After all, it’s the customers who in the end, will likely determine when and under what codecs the market will unify.