I didn't RTFA, or most of the comments, but the majority of the ones I bothered to look at, just don't get it. It has almost nothing to do with quality, bandwidth, or open source evangelism, it's all about money. Note the timing of Google's purchase of On2 - right before MPEG LA makes the decision of whether to charge licensing fees for on-line video distribution: Charge fees = YouTube moves to VP8, and h.264 dies; no fees till 2016 = people still use h.264, because it is designed in to every mobile device, and MPEG LA can gain fees from device manufactures. As a developer for a regional university, I recently backed off supporting HTML 5 video, for many reasons. Practically all of them can be summed up in the following statement: We have hundreds of terabytes of video, and not enough machines, people or storage to have video in two formats, let alone three. In addition to this, practically every modern mobile device will play h.264/3gp; the codec of choice is obvious, unless there is a licensing fee for broadcast across "the tubes". If there is a viable alternative, as soon as there is a fee for h.264, my university, and I'd be willing to bet that many others as well, will run away. The bean counters at MPEG LA know this. If YouTube migrates to VP8 mobile devices will almost HAVE to support VP8, AND if Google releases the codec every cash-strapped university (and business) on the planet will run to VP8. MPEG LA's licensing fees dry up, and they are used by some little niche industry producing video discs for old timey TV boxes. Honestly, I'd love to see VP8 released, but I think the current "threat" will be enough to stay the hands of MPEG LA's money grubbing bean counters from charging Interweb broadcast fees.

Living in Evansville, IN.
Midwest Storm
If I had some Mod Points....