I mean maybe? But does that matter? It's by far the highest efficiency (in terms of bandwidth) open codec out there. It takes a lot of money to develop these sorts of things, especially given the patent risk, so I'm not sure how else you'd expect something like this to be created.

Netflix and Facebook were also early adopters of this. Between Google (Youtube), Facebook (various) and Netflix you have three of the biggest content providers. Other big ones like iQiyi and Vimeo jumped on it pretty quickly too.