[elpuri]

I'm nothing more than a layman what comes to things like these, but...

What's there for Google?

- Google, Apple and Microsoft can afford the license and the fee is peanuts to them. Most likely Flash will be history no matter what codec wins. - If Mozilla decides to stick with it's values and stay free (is anything else even an option?) while the web goes h.264, I'd say a significant part of people will migrate to other browsers. And come on who's going to migrate to IE and Safari isn't that popular on PC, so that's even better for Google and it's Chrome. How could a bigger browser market share be bad? One downside though would be that some smart people who would be really valuable employees and have strong personal values might get pissed off and not join Google.

- "You owe it to the public" "if you care about free software". No matter how much it sucks, the only entities Google owes something is it's creditors and share holders. Sometimes same things benefit both the public and the share holders which is just super, but isn't it a bit naive to ask a publicly listed company not to take advantage of the situation just because it would be nice? Again though there's the possible loss of love, of which effect on the business as a whole I'm not competent to evaluate.

- Mobile hardware support is important and it's going to get even more important in years to come. I might be talking out of my ass here, but isn't the world full of hardware support for h.264? If that hardware support is something really generic like doing ICT really fast and can be applied to VP8 then this might not be that important.

[halo]

What if Google simply see a long-term strategic advantage in helping the web have a free video standard? Especially a standard where they have a significant amount of control over its codebase, tooling, and direction, as well as avoiding the prospect of unknown patent licensing fees on the distant horizon. I mean, Google likes web standards -- the fact they can easily search content allows them to exist -- and audio/video content will make the web more useful which will make their search engine more useful. If Google don't plan to open up the codecs, it certainly makes you wonder why they bought On2.

People act as though the H.264 video tag is a foregone conclusion, but it really isn't - it's still a long way from being viable. Web technologies have never been about what developers want or what sites use but rather what browsers implement, and today ~88% of web-browser marketshare doesn't support the H.264 video tag (58% IE, 28% Firefox, 2% Opera). This is worse than Ogg Theora where ~68% aren't supported, while Flash is unavailable on less than 1% of browsers. Of course, this may change if Microsoft decide one way or another.

Although mobile devices are going to be increasingly relevent in the coming years, it's still a rounding error and users regularly update their handsets, which means the current H.264 support isn't a particularly strong argument in its favour. I suspect that mobile devices will converge towards whatever is done by desktop browsers, as has been the historical trend.