It can't be quite as simple as that. Because the amount of money they can extract from such a thing doesn't depend on the amount of patents covering it -- it o

It can't be quite as simple as that. Because the amount of money they can extract from such a thing doesn't depend on the amount of patents covering it -- it only depends on how much people are willing to pay for a video codec. What I can imagine is that every single stakeholder who had some kind of video patent would want to get a share of that pie, so they played whatever political game they could to bloat the spec to include their own patent.