Amongst other things...
getting 11 big names in MPEG codecs to licence any patents they have that apply to VP8 to anyone at no cost.
Putting a reciprocal patent licence on VP8 and then including it in Android 2.3 (notice Apple, Microsoft and Nokia couldn't accept either Theora or VP8 in HTML5 because they claimed they'd get sued, a range of Android OEMs seem to think this wasn't a showstopper. Even in the midst of smartphone patent armageddon the only lawsuit so far was started by Nokia)
As a fairly direct result of the above getting nearly every big name in GPUs and chipsets to build VP8 into their products.
The work around webrtc, with the currently stalled effort to make vp8 mandatory and it looks like it will be a major first usecase for vp9.