Google explains the drop of H.264 & Empowers Flash

[codecdictionary]

by pulling out of H.264, Google is ensuring that Flash, and not HTML5, will continue to be the de-facto video standard for years to come.

Our announcement was only related to the <video> tag, which is part of the emerging HTML platform. While the HTML video platform offers great promise, few sites use it today and therefore few users will be immediately impacted by this change.

If they do that and pull down all the H.264 YouTube content they made in their initial agreement with Apple for the iPhone, Apple might have to yield and support WebM in mobile Safari. But it’s Apple, they’re stubborn, and they may not do it even then. Plus, that would be a fairly non-don’t be evil thing for Google to do.

source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/14/google-h264-flash/