...more recent posts
It's not clear yet if this amounts to more than a small effort by some niche group inside the company, but Google has created a grant to fund TheorARM, an ARM optimized version of the Theora video codec. This is a good thing even if it's the case that Theora can never be as sophisticated as h.264 (which seems true to me although is clearly beyond my expertise.) I think the idea here would just be to have a "good enough" fall back codec that is free in both senses.
But is google just funding it, or are they going to push it too? The post doesn't say anything about them actually using it (like, say, switching YouTube to it.) I can't imagine they would do that. Or how about on the hardware side? Are they going to order a couple million chips for the Nexus Two with TheorARM decode hardware? Having the optimized codec is great, but if it's not present in commodity chips than it won't matter and it probably won't get into chips unless someone big orders a huge amount of them.
And then there is the unclear patent situation. MPEG-LA has hinted that they may have patents that Theora violates (but I guess of course they would hint that.) And of course there are tons of other patent trolls out there as well just waiting to sink this ship (or any ship for that matter.)
Still, this makes me a little hopeful. It's certainly a small step in the right direction. We'll see what the analysis is from people who know more than me.