(My earlier reply was to the original version of your comment.)
It will benefit Google in two ways:
First, it insulates them from encoder licensing fees going forward, and from decoder license fees if MPEG-LA decides to back off their free-for-web-streaming arrangement. It also means they're free to bundle the codec with Chrome.
Second, if you believe the publishing hype, it could save them up to 50% bandwidth. I doubt it's that effective, but at Youtube's scale, processing is cheap and bandwidth is expensive; every 1% helps. If they can reduce the number of storage nodes, bytes transferred, and by extension, open conns/sec, that translates to very real savings.
It will benefit Google in two ways:
First, it insulates them from encoder licensing fees going forward, and from decoder license fees if MPEG-LA decides to back off their free-for-web-streaming arrangement. It also means they're free to bundle the codec with Chrome.
Second, if you believe the publishing hype, it could save them up to 50% bandwidth. I doubt it's that effective, but at Youtube's scale, processing is cheap and bandwidth is expensive; every 1% helps. If they can reduce the number of storage nodes, bytes transferred, and by extension, open conns/sec, that translates to very real savings.