MPEG LA Announces Call for Patents Essential to VP8 Video Codec

Chrome is already supporting WebM (which is about ~10% market share now). Firefox will be supporting it soon (which is about ~23% market share), and various other minor browsers are also behind it. WebM can be supported on Internet Explorer (although most don't even support the video tag) with just a codec installed on the system. Flash is also going to be backing WebM, which means that if your browser doesn't _natively_ support it, you'll have upwards of 99.9% of all desktop machines. Embedded manufacturers have also thrown their weight behind also supporting WebM in hardware, so Google has made excellent progress.

And also, in reality, there's very little of the web that's already taking advantage of the web's video tag for H264 video playback that _isn't_ named "youtube".