And if you're a content creator or video professional?

Or try to make a website that serves a lot of H.264 video and then come back and tell us how free H.264 is.

More generally, this is a video format we're talking about. "Free as in speech" is a huge deal. Speech is what it's for, for crying out loud.

There are licensing costs built into OSes shipping h264, devices built with HW decoders, online movies rented with it, etc.

So by having VP8 I save a few cents off the price of an OS upgrade or new device.

And in exchange I get significantly poorer quality video.

For every copy of Windows 8 Basic sold, Microsoft saves $2 by not including. That adds up!

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/142796-how-to-play-dvds...

Nothing is stopping you from paying for h.264 for better quality (although the difference is far from what you try to portray).

Meanwhile those who doesn't want to pay for the priviledge of the better quality h.264 offers (and likely h.265 in comparison with vp9) will be able to use a free codec, hopefully one which will be standarised under HTML5 and thus supported across all HTML5 compliant software.

See, it works out for everyone.

Depends on what you are using it for e.g. renting TV shows or for cut scenes in video games.

They also reserved the right to start charging for free videos (you remember when Apple fought against the MPEG-LA when they tried that with AAC audio codec, right?). They only made that permanently free a few months after WebM was announced.