The way I see it, H.264 is more about practicality than anything else. Hardware acceleration for it is everywhere. VP9 is great, but until there's hardware acceleration available for it, it's a bad idea to use the codec on devices where high CPU usage is undesirable.
It wasn't a problem when H.264 was new. There were devices that had H.264 decoding support well before it was popular with users; I remember iPod videos sporting support for it back when DivX/XviD and flv was the norm. Eventually because devices had support for it, people switched over to H.264 and the older standards died out.
> It wasn't a problem when H.264 was new. There were devices that had H.264 decoding support well before it was popular with users;
You might be happy to know that it's not a problem for WebM either! There are[1] devices that have VP8 decoding support right now. Just not all devices (just as not all devices had H.264 hardware decoders when it was new.)
Obviously the iPod would supported H264 since Apple were a member of the consortium pushing it (MPEG-LA)[2]. Similarly, ARM Chromebooks support VP8 because Google is behind it. Several chip-makers have promised support: Intel is taking a wait and see attitude [1] and might support it in the future
