So, Google will be trans-codes all it's material to open standards VP8, as it drops H.264 it will save 5 or 6 million dollars annually in licencing fees for Chrome. Should we care? Just while the 800 pound gorilla adjusts itself a little. Steve.
Eventually, in order to consolidate their infrastructure overhead, Google will need to transcode the entire YouTube library into a smaller subset of formats, and since they have to go through the painful effort of doing this anyway, they might as well do it with open formats that they control in which they are beholden to no-one.
A list of supported video formats on YouTube (Source: Wikipedia)
YouTube says that 35 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and that around three quarters of the material comes from outside the US.[15][16] It is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.17YouTube has more viewers? Certainly the number is large, but the total hours viewed may not be quite as large as the prime time audience... But then it is just a matter of time. Steve.
In May 2010, it was reported that YouTube was serving more than two billion videos a day, which it described as "nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined."[32]
