[app]

Great article. I drew that very chart this morning trying to sort out the implications of this change.

> "As a side note, it would be great if MPEG LA would simply open up the licensing terms for H.264 and make it royalty-free forever for 1: browsers to implement it, and 2: people on the Internet to produce & sell video with it."

How hard would this be to do? Is that all that prevents FF/Opera/Chrome from supporting h.264?

[Hadamard]

Actually it is far from hard. Most of the MPEG-LA money comes from embedded devices. Strange enough that GooGuys didn't think enough. The web is - alas - nothing. All mobile content created today is h.264. Sony, Nokia, Samsung, LG (Marvell, Quallcomm, Samsung, Nvidia) will not be so quichk to dump H.264. YouTube of pure WebM? Transcoding all H.264 to WebM? Great - GooFool will have to pay MPEG-LA just as they pay today!!! Decoder and encode fees are equal to the price of a full CoDec. Free streaming like YouTube is free anyway. Till you'll have WebM acceleration for encoding on mobile phones MVC H.264 will dominate anyway (3D) where WebM isn't even thinking of what should be done. It seems that the most likely result (instead of saving FireFox, which is losing share) will be Chrome losing share for Maxthon (100% free with H.264 and HTML5), IE9 and Safari... Good job Goofools, you have just turned into a Steve Jobs.