> will Flash Player support be dropped as well? If not, why?
Flash has no easy replacement available yet. We will see with HTML5 and beyond. Realistically it will take a few more years.
> Android currently supports H.264. Will this support be removed from Android? If not, why not?
My guess is that future Nexus phones will have hardware WebM decoding included. I don't know if Google will remove H.264 anytime soon though.
> YouTube uses H.264 to encode video. Presumably, YouTube will be re-encoding its entire library using WebM. When this happens, will YouTube’s support for H.264 be dropped, to “enable open innovation”? If not, why not?
It will be dropped. Why not?
> Do you expect companies like Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo, Major League Baseball, and anyone else who currently streams H.264 to dual-encode all of their video using WebM?
Sure. They all have enough money for a few gigs per movie, the distribution system would stay the same. Btw. Netflix uses Silverlight and adding WebM decoding to Silverlight should be rather easy.
> Who is happy about this?
Given the counter-scenario and a few years: everyone!
Flash has no easy replacement available yet. We will see with HTML5 and beyond. Realistically it will take a few more years.
> Android currently supports H.264. Will this support be removed from Android? If not, why not?
My guess is that future Nexus phones will have hardware WebM decoding included. I don't know if Google will remove H.264 anytime soon though.
> YouTube uses H.264 to encode video. Presumably, YouTube will be re-encoding its entire library using WebM. When this happens, will YouTube’s support for H.264 be dropped, to “enable open innovation”? If not, why not?
It will be dropped. Why not?
> Do you expect companies like Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo, Major League Baseball, and anyone else who currently streams H.264 to dual-encode all of their video using WebM?
Sure. They all have enough money for a few gigs per movie, the distribution system would stay the same. Btw. Netflix uses Silverlight and adding WebM decoding to Silverlight should be rather easy.
> Who is happy about this?
Given the counter-scenario and a few years: everyone!