2001 called, they want their opinion back! People said the same thing about audio/video back in the day, now look at HTML5.

I'm *NOT* advocating that we just add every format into a browser, but should a good format emerge I don't see any reason not to add it to a browser. Better in the core browser than in an addon: speed and reliability are always better in the core browser.

Let's pretend you're a moderately large site getting a couple million hits a day. I'm guessing you don't have logging turned on because

#1) You'd have huge log files
#2) Your disk throughput/server load is going to suffer
#3) You don't even use logs for doing statistical analysis
#4) You have lots of servers and would have to aggregate all the logs into one

Whose going to pay for the disks I'll need just to store the logs if the FBI wants to look at them? It's not going to be the FBI that's for sure. The logistics of storing that much data are insane on the Facebook/Google/Digg scale get pretty insane pretty quick.

My small server farm (three servers) does 1.5G of logs per day. Multiply that by two years and that's a 1095 gigs of logs!

The browsers need to start supporting free codecs now. Streaming h.264 is free for now, but that party is going to end at the end of 2010. If YouTube has to start paying royalties for every h.264 stream they serve up you better bet the whole game is going to change.

Theora/Dirac/Whatever start looking real good when consider that it keeps the web "free". Imagine if you had to pay everytime you served up a jpeg on your website? If you want to serve video from your site in a couple years, you may have to. I say we pick an open format now, to avoid all that headache now.

There is already a technically superior, non-patent encumbered, world wide standard with ubiquitous silicon support: ISO/MPEG

Where did you get the idea that MPEG is not patent encumbered? It's been patented since MPEG 1.

Not to mention the impending MPEG4 patent licensing bomb that's coming up next year. Remember all those sites streaming MPEG4 for free (I'm looking at you YouTube). It's going to be very expensive to stream MPEG4 after 2010.

Now is the time to start converting all that content to free format.