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To you a 33% drop from 1.5 to 1 is not much, but when you're paying for bandwidth usage that is a pretty good bit of savings. I'm not sure of anyone legitimate that's pushing that kind of data isn't using a licensed encoder.

Then they should be paying for the encoder, and the decoder should be open-source and patent-free.

How many times as a viewer have you had to pay for the decoder? Have you ever paid for a video player?

Ogg Theora is right there.

Theora is incredibly primitive compared even to H.264.

H.264 High Profile will soon if not already patent free. Most of the current active patent are actually SVC usage.