Re: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/googles-h264-decision-its-a...
This is a mostly idiotic article.

First of all, for an Infrastructure Architect the guy has his storage knowledge all backwards: “With YouTube, we’re talking about exabytes upon exabytes of storage. Maybe even petabytes.”

1 Exabyte = 1,024 Petabytes = 1,048,576 Terabytes

I’m sure that it was an innocent mixup, but good grief does it come across as someone who’s trying to appear important and knowledgeable simply by tossing in some obscure computer terms.

Second, as others have pointed out as well, the whole logic of his argument doesn’t make sense. Youtube, with all its massiveness, is probably never going to be able to drop H.264 simply because it would no longer be able to stream its videos to any of the Android [1], iOS, webOS and Blackberry devices out there today. That’s hundreds of millions of devices that would suddenly not be able to play Youtube videos anymore if Youtube goes WebM only.

( [1] side note: Only Android devices running 2.3 and higher are capable of WebM, but 1: that's with a battery-draining software renderer and 2: as we know, Android fragmentation is a pretty serious thing and millions of people are still running pre-2.3 OSes and there's no way that all of them will be upgraded at some point.)

Quoth the fool Jason Perlow: My guess is that in addition to Android licensees, Apple and other device manufacturers which use embedded browsers such as RIM are not going to deny their customers and end-users embedded YouTube video support if Google chooses to encode to to a VP8/Theora standard, and I would expect the same of Microsoft and Internet Explorer and its embedded variations as well. Mozilla and Firefox we already know is completely on-board.

Yes, I'm sure Apple, RIM, Microsoft and HP/Palm can somehow magically upgrade all the devices they have already sold to millions of customers and add WebM support to them. It’s not like if you're the owner of an iPhone 3G you can't install the very latest version of iOS on your device. Oh, wait. You can't.

Simply put, the chance of Youtube dropping H.264 entirely and only maintaining their videos in WebM container format using VP8 is about 0.01%. It's higher if you look WAY far into the future, when absolutely no one uses ANY of the 300+ million mobile computing devices we're using today anymore. But that's a whole lot of years into the future, and also depends entirely on Microsoft and Apple adding WebM support to their devices when they don't yet have much incentive to do so. Or at least, it won't be because of Youtube.

There should be no doubt that Google wants there to be only one format for video on the Web, 20–30 years from now, and that they prefer it to be WebM instead of H.264 if only so that they (and you, using their infrastructure) can sell video whenever and wherever they (and you) want without having to pay MPEG LA for it. Storage and technical specifics of the video format are secondary concerns which are actually great arguments against this logic, for the situation in the "short" term that is the coming 5 to 10 years.

So all in all, sure, Youtube is an obvious motivator for this kind of move, but the article has the entire thing backwards in explaining it.