The threat of VP8 (and before that Theora) was enough to stop H.264 having its price increased at the point where they had conveniently planned an opportunity f

The threat of VP8 (and before that Theora) was enough to stop H.264 having its price increased at the point where they had conveniently planned an opportunity for them to one-sidedly renegotiate their prices after they had control of the market. > H.264 answers Google's open codec with forever free license (from 2010) https://www.theregister.com/2010/08/26/mpegla_v_google/ https://www.theregister.com/2010/08/26/mpegla_v_google/ H.265 never really took off on the web for the same reasons. So yes, it's taken a while, but most web usage is jumping from the H.264 that couldn't strangle web video due to VP8 to AV1, so it's overall a very clear win. Part of the delay was the patents side dangling a royalty free subset of AVC and HEVC at various points that never materialised. Which should have been predictable as this is very much a "scorpion and the frog" situation. Codec makers are not permanantly binding themselves to reasonable deals in perpetuity (well excluding the "open"/royalty free ones that do exactly that) because milking rent from a locked-in market is the end-game. They know it and we know it.