[Terretta]

YouTube is not ‘vastly’. Get back to us when it’s ‘vast’ among commercial content providers.

Contrary to your point about not watching on iOS, I, and everyone I know, watch all content on an iOS device, both in the living room and on the go.

There is certainly a segment of the market that is using misc devices or “casting” to USB sticks plugged into TVs, but the 4K TV owning cord cutters I know tend to also own iPhones and use Apple TVs.

We saw this shift happen even more when iOS (and TvOS) gained SSO across apps with the “TV” app as indexer, and another bump when Amazon Prime released.

[gsich]

Why not? Just go by traffic. Youtube default to VP9 on Chrome, so yes it is vastly used. Netflix can't even display 4K on the desktop properly.

If you watch in the living room (on TV) you are not watching it on the iOS device. By that I mean the screen of the iOS device. Being in the living room, watching on TV, means you have no battery issue. Watching on your device means literally that, watching it on your device with your devices' screen. Not some casting or streaming to other displays.

[MBCook]

So what you’re saying is since Google has manipulated the environment so that Google’s preferred codec is the most used on Google‘s website, which happens to be the largest video site on the Internet… that means Google’s codec is better.

If we ignore YouTube, which Google controls to their own benefit, what’s the percentage of WebM/VP9 versus H264/H265?

[izacus]

Why are you using double standards when talking about Google's codec choices vs. Apple codec choices. Do you think Apple collecting royalties for h.264/h.265 has nothing to do with them preventing you from using VP9?

[matthewmacleod]

I think we can say with quite a lot of confidence that any royalties Apple receives for h.264 are a rounding error in their income, and they will have ~zero impact on their decision to support other codecs or not.

[MBCook]

H264 is also used by Blu-Ray isn’t it? I know my cable system switched to it from MPEG2 a few years ago.

H264 is used in other places in the electronics industry. That’s one of the reasons Apple picked it. Isn’t it the format most digital cameras record video in?

WebM/VP9 is used by... Google. And Wikipedia (who won’t use something with patent licensing). Is there anything else big?

[izacus]

So VP9 is "just" used by the largest video streaming service in the world, which is quickly dwarfing Blu-Ray.

[MBCook]

Yes. Because they forced it with their pseudo-monopoly on the browser market and de facto monopoly on online video sites.

Basically everyone else uses H264 like Apple since it was the designated successor to MPEG2.

In this case, Apple went with the industry standard. Google is the odd man out.

So why should Apple have to bend to Google’s whim here and implement WebM/VP9?

Why shouldn’t Google just fix their site?

[gsich]

No. It means that it's used.