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Not really, for a few reasons. Firstly, developing high-quality video codecs is hard. Hard enough that so far the MPEG group has had a near-monopoly on video codecs since MPEG-2 (the last non-MPEG codecs I can think of having achieved any major successes (prior to Google literally giving away VP8) were probably Sorenson Video 1 and Intel Indeo 5, both from the late 90s). Additionally, since the MPEG group has been so dominant in the video codec space for decades trying to write a high-quality codec to compete against them means going up against a minefield of patents on MPEG technologies, significantly exacerbating the already-high development costs since every technological decision needs to be checked to ensure it doesn't infringe any.

Secondly, this near-monopoly has been reinforced through network effects. If lots of people are using a codec they're more likely to attract other people to write high-quality encoders for it and hardware makers to embed special hardware to decode it (instead of having the main CPU do all the work). This is especially insidious on mobile devices since software-only video playback can use multiple times the battery power as dedicated hardware decoding. This makes it hard for alternative codecs to get into wide use.

The main reason these companies are even bothering to put in the time and effort is because the MPEG-LA (the official MPEG patent pool licensing authority) screwed up the licensing for H.256, the successor to the current standard H.264. The MPEG-LA included a clause in the H.264 licensing that provided a steep discount for web companies (which was supposed to go away after a few years) to spur use of the codec. Unfortunately for the MPEG-LA Youtube and other user-driven video sites exploded in popularity before that happened and they realized that if those sites were required to pay the full royalty rate they would go bankrupt so the discount became permanent.

For H.265 the MPEG-LA didn't want a repeat of this so they didn't give quite as generous a discount. On top of that, two other patent pools sprung up claiming they had patents on parts of H.265 (so you would need to pay all 3 groups to be fully legally covered). This is the main reason Google purchased On2 Technologies and gave away their (MPEG patent-free) VP8 and VP9 codecs. Let that sink in: Google thought it would be cheaper to buy a whole codec company than to pay the new royalty rates.

However, VP9 by itself doesn't quite compete with H.265 (its quality is somewhere between H.264 and H.265). In order to ensure H.265 never reaches critical mass on the web and forces everyone to pay the MPEG-LA (and other) royalties due to the network effect there needed to be a royalty-free codec that was at least as good as H.265 if not better. That's when Google, Xiph/Mozlla, and Cisco got together to combine the technologies of all of their experimental new royalty-free codecs. Additionally, they invited the hardware manufacturers to ensure that the codec would have no problems being implemented in hardware so it would be hardware-accelerated in every device from your desktop gaming rig all the way down to your smart watch (like H.264 is today).

tl;dr: If they didn't band together to make a free codec there would not be a large enough critical mass to overcome the (expensive) status quo.

/r/Games Thread Parent Link - twitch.amazon.com