worst case scenario: One more codec we have to encode videos in if they were to be supported by the <video>-tag: Safari uses h.264, Mozilla uses Theora and Chro

worst case scenario: One more codec we have to encode videos in if they were to be supported by the <video>-tag: Safari uses h.264, Mozilla uses Theora and Chrome now uses any of the newly acquired codecs to save on h.264 license fees. Before this, we just had h.264 and Theora. Better scenario: Google opensources some or all of the acquired codecs and gives a free patent license (I don't think they can give the patents away to public domain, can they?) at which time, we'll have Safari on one side and Chrome / Mozilla on the other which basically is the same as we had today, but reversed. Best-case scenario: As above, but the HTML5-guys agree to actually mandate the use of one of these new codecs forcing compliant browsers (this then may include Safari) to implement them and thus we only need to encode the video once (assuming youtube supports the new codec aswell, because we'll need to still fall back to youtube for IE). Or anything in between. Just don't get your hopes up.