Wow. Nice unbiased list. That's akin to saying "Why do we need Chrome, Firefox or Safari, when we have a perfectly good browser in IE that supports plugins and video?" (that worked so well in the last decade after all) Or better, "HTML markup would be so much better if it were owned by by a large corporate patent troll." Yes you can view most H.264 content for free, but the software to encode it has huge fees. Yes H.264 is on all of those devices but they are not compatible with each other. Yes it has hardware support but you know why? Because it's an inferior codec that needs it. Yes its supported by Flash (which you pay for) but WebM will be as well. Open code dump? Wat why am I bothering to reply to this? http://clubajax.org/the-impact-of-chrome-dropping-the-h-264-codec/