Microsoft and Apple aren't paying for the licenses at all. They are companies not the codec license charity faries. The cost is just attached to the price of their products without the consumer knowing.

Also if you are running a H.264 subscription service you are likely to be paying [tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/h-264-patents-how-much-do-the...).

Also there is Android, Chrome and ChromeOS which should have support.

Not everyone wants to pay a tax or go though a licensing procedure to implement some supposedly 'open' standard.

The main issue is Free software doesn't work with licensing. Linux distros are free (as in money), they can't have proprietary licensed patents. So you can't legally playback videos on your Linux distro so people keep buying Windows. It could even be considered another form of vendor lock in, except this time it's locking you into big business $$$ all hail capitalism VS opensource not everything has to have money running it.

There are usage cases for people outside of the bigcontent->consumer devices ecosystem. For example if I'm a game dev looking to put FMV videos into my game I can shop around for something proprietary like Blink or H.26X and fork over money for a 'off the shelf solution' or I can grab a open source library stick it in and not have to pay a dime. And who cares if it has to full back onto software decoding on Apple and Windows devices it's only a few minutes of playback and the game itself is going to be eating the battery much more. Similarly if I'm looking to implement some kind of video chat protocol.

Also if I'm on standards body looking to make a new standard for some new media or transmission format why use something that will require the companies making products get an extra overhead. Unfortunately we are likely to be stuck with H.26X derivatives from now on since it had gotten wide spread usage by being first to the gate and has so many companies backing it, generally with vested interests (the companies in the H.264 patent pool is basically every hardware manufacturer ever, I can't see how a fucking video codec can have that many patents on it)

Also patents on technology are now basically forever, not 20 years. Most technology doesn't last 20 years now days. Even the older industries that rely on 30 year old technology due to it's reliability are probably going to end up moving onto a fast update cycle (look at SpaceX making a new rocket in 2 years). We are unlikely to ever see H.26X free as they will just keep releasing newer versions with more patents on it and ensuring their employees on the various standards boards vote it in for things like new media format standards. Yeh, your media player doesn't have to pay for H.264 in the year 2030, but there is still a license cost for H.265 and by then they are up to H.269 with super retina display support and 3D volumetric holograms or whatever.

It also goes well beyond a single video codec. Look at the future of SD Cards, SDXC. It's using the exfat filesystem from Microsoft so every SD card reader will have a hidden MS tax attached to it for the next 20 years (by which time we will likely have abandoned the format and just be using some wireless storage standard, chances are it will have it's own licensing). Pretty much every device in existence has hundreds of companies receiving kickbacks (if they use H.264 there are hundreds right there). These licenses are generally not horrible individually but all this crap together with other stuff like DRM, secure boot loaders and so on makes a web trapping people to specific technologies, business interests and so on and generally just making alternatives such as Linux much more of a pain to use.