To be honest I suspect it isn't actually a differentiator. It's good for Google that they can produce this chip and trim their hardware costs by some percentage

To be honest I suspect it isn't actually a differentiator. It's good for Google that they can produce this chip and trim their hardware costs by some percentage, but it's not going to give them a competitive advantage in the market of video sharing. Especially in a business like youtube with network effects, getting the audience is the difficult bit, the technical solutions are interesting but you're not going to beat google by having 5% cheaper encoding costs.