[cpearce]

"Of course, hardware adoption is still a huge question mark which I noticed Google also failed to discuss further in this post."

This has been discussed on the WebM blog:

"The WebM/VP8 hardware decoder implementation has already been licensed to over twenty partners and is proven in silicon. We expect the first commercial chips to integrate our VP8 decoder IP to be available in the first quarter of 2011."

http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8...

"They don't address why they're removing it, why they chose to do it now, or whether or not they'll be consistent across their platforms."

Incidentally, months ago they've also blogged about why they'll keep YouTube using Flash, rather than HTML5: http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html

[drivebyacct2]

Oh I saw that, I meant more that there are millions of mobile (and non-mobile) devices that have hardware decoding that won't be able to play WebM video anywhere near as well as H.264.

[weixiyen]

I think people change phones pretty often, especially in the smartphone market, so the mobile devices should be the quickest to support WebM.

[ZeroGravitas]

The smartphone market is also growing quickly itself, which is why Android managed to equal the installed base of iPhones only a few months after the marketshare (i.e. current sales) rose above Apple's.