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?
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.
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?
No, browsers and hardware manufacturers have implemented VP9 because it has better licensing terms than H.264 and especially better than HEVC. HEVC was released at around the same time as VP9 and yet today VP9 has double the installed base of HEVC: https://ngcodec.com/news/2017/10/21/why-we-are-supporting-vp...
> In this case, Apple went with the industry standard.
Applenuses the same codec everywhere. They needed H264 support for other things (like video foot recorded from iPhones, or physical cameras). They also support it in Safari.
This isn’t like Mozilla, who only makes a web browser.
I really don't know what you're trying to argue. We're talking about web video here. There's nothing stopping Apple from adding VP9 support. VP9 outperforms H.264 and the other major browsers have added support for it.
Apple will be adding support for AV1. Like VP9, AV1 is royalty-free. The Alliance for Open Media has been so effective (even before AV1's release) and HEVC's licensing has been so terrible that MPEG is starting to question whether it can survive as an organization: