[threeseed]

YouTube doesn't primarly use VP9. It uses H.264 on iOS, Safari, IE, Flash, Consoles, TVs and a lot of Android devices. Those combined are a sizeable amount of traffic.

And I would argue that the driver of higher end content e.g. 1080p, 4K is not going to come from YouTube but from Netflix, Amazon, Apple and illegal content which a lot of people watch on consoles.

Nothing has fundamentally changed to see this being anything other than a repeat of what happened with H.264/VP9.

[ac29]

You're right, it is more complicated than I assumed. I use Chrome/Linux where nearly 100% of videos are served VP9. According to this [0] 61-69% of browsers support VP9, but I cant find a good source as to what percentage of youtube is actually served with VP9.

However, in the last year 25,000,000,000 hours of VP9 video have been served on youtube [1]. Maybe this is a minority of web video, but its hardly dead.

[0] http://caniuse.com/#search=vp9

[1] http://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/2015/04/vp9-faster-better-bu...