This could greatly strengthen the business case for sites like YouTube. Since they have a h264 license you don't have to worry about it. Let them compress your video for you and problem solved. The only downside is that all your videos now has to be hosted on YouTube. Perhaps in the near future we'll see a new service which lets you host password protected private videos. I wonder if Google had this scenario in mind when they bought Youtube?
Yes, this would greatly strengthen all big players that want to own the web (Goog, Apl..). Now if you want to make the competitive browser you have to pay the licenses, same for video site and probably many things.
The absurdity goes even to this. If you compile the "Open Sourced" Chrome by yourself and distribute it you would have to pay the license to MPEG guys.
On VP6 is still the most widely used codec on the web... almost all live streaming is vp6. (Flash web cam chat is Spark codec).
So the opportunity still exists for you or your sister to encode web videos for commercial use and have them playable by the majority of users today with no legal hassles.
The issue tends to be with the HD quality video craze thats happening now. VP6 is fine, but its noticeably different in quality to h.264. Most people wont notice the difference when encoded at high bitrates unless you know what to look for.
What bugs me is Apple is part of that whole h.264 consortium that owns the h.264 patents, yet the also serve on the web standards group defining html5... I don't think they can be impartial there, also denying flash on apple products is more to do with protecting the codecs that can be used to the ones they own. If you sell a app on the apple store that uses h.264 video then you better be sure you own the commercial license as apple know who you are.
