If you leave Google conspiracy theories out of consideration it should be obvious that Opera, Mozilla and the FSF (amongst others in the WebM supporters list: <a href="http://www.webmproject.org/about/supporters/" rel="nofollow">http://www.webmproject.org/about/supporters/</a>) don't actually care about WebM in itself, they support free software/open source/open web friendly, royalty-free formats. But it's not just lack of royalties alone, they have to be useful too, so the more viable in the market the better, given the basic requirements are met.<p>That's why they supported Theora, and now prioritise WebM, and make clear they're happy to support any new codecs that meet their needs. Examining the new MPEG proposal from their point of view would be interesting.<p>For example, why is it better than just waiting for MPEG1/2 which already has great free software encoders and is implemented <i>everywhere</i> to fall out of patent coverage. How good can it possibly be if they take an ultra-conservative approach to patents? Better or worse than Theora? When will it be ready? When will hardware support it, if at all? How can they avoid poisonous politics in their "open and inclusive" process if they are at the same time pushing H.264 and H.265 as the (very, very lucrative) present and future of video codecs? Why did it take MPEG so long to do this? How do we know this won't end up like the royalty-free profile of H.264 which they promised but never delivered? Which royalty-free audio codec do they intend to pair it with?<p>(Another interesting thing to read would be to choose H.264 patents at random and say "Let's just imagine VP8 infringed this. How much worse would the encoder/decoder be if VP8 simply dropped this element?" 10%, 1%, 0.1%, 0.000001%? This blog's analysis in parts seems to suggest that a single blow would kill VP8, in others he more realistically claims that it would require a number of difficult to work around/buy out/invalidate patents before it becomes a complete road block for VP8)