There are two different kinds of royalties associated with H.264. One is the fee on each encoder or decoder, and the other is a per stream royalty. Although mos

There are two different kinds of royalties associated with H.264. One is the fee on each encoder or decoder, and the other is a per stream royalty. Although most of us are concerned with royalties on the codec, Google is more concerned about the royalties on the streams. Although the Ars article mentions that MPEG-LA won't charge per-stream royalties for free youtube videos (for 5 more years, anyway), H.264 content from the Youtube Store are already subject to per-stream fees, starting at the beginning of this year. Also, Google TV streams may not fall under MPEG-LA's definition of royality-free "Internet Broadcast AVC Video". Furthermore, MPEG-LA hasn't yet made it clear exactly how much these fees will be! WebM (vp8), along with lower-quality FLV (vp6), is a hedge against both current and upcoming per-stream h.264 royalties.