how does redundancy help you when the main power switch goes down / on fire and there is no one there
If you are a big enough operation, you have redundancy at the data center level. i.e. you can lose an entire data center and have no loss of service on your production applications. Other than a possible speed/performance degradation, your average customer has no knowledge that anything bad has happened.
This was tried, and rejected by the government in the past.
Requiring users to download and install some codec is probably a non-starter in both cases, though.
While it would be better if free codecs were included "out of the box", I wouldn't say it's a non-starter. There are an awful lot of systems out there where the user has chosen to install Flash. If major "trusted" web sites required WebM, Theora, etc., I would expect that most users would install the appropriate software to view that content, just as many users install Flash today.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
