It hasn't exactly been sudden; people have been asking if Google has been planning this ever since Google announced it's intent to acquire On2. See http://www.t

It hasn't exactly been sudden; people have been asking if Google has been planning this ever since Google announced it's intent to acquire On2. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/06/google_vp6_open_source/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/06/google_vp6_open_sour... for example. The buzz picked back up again once Google finalized the deal; they spent a while in negotiation. One of the barriers to adoption of Theora has been the quality issue; why would Apple or Nokia take the extra risk and cost of going with Theora if they already implement a superior codec? There's a chance that VP8 would help with that, but it's still an uphill battle. It took years for Xiph to take VP3 to something that they wanted to call a stable standard. Google has more resources than Xiph, for sure, but they likely can't just dump VP8 as-is as a new standard. There's also the issue of submarine patents, the hardware issue, just getting this implemented and as widely deployed as H.264, and more, so yeah, it would be tough for this to become a standard. On the other hand, what the heck else is Google planning on doing with On2? Why would they get into the proprietary codec business, when H.264 seems to be winning out in most places in the market, and they've already bought all the licenses, encoded most of YouTube in H.264, and so on? Of course, those questions also apply to an open codec, but Google has been a big proponent of open, freely implementable standards, so at least that route makes some amount of sense.