Last time i checked there a lot of video services out there with subscription/premium service. Vimeo has premium subscription.
Ok, so you don't want to specify the codec. Technically a good reason. But think about it, what will happen then?
MS will support wmv by default, Apple will support Quicktime by default, Mozilla theora. This is a freaking nightmare for every enduser!
Now on a desktop you can probably tell the user to install the correct decoder (my family/mother/older people certainly would never be able to do that!). But on a phone? So Windows Mobile 7 will ship with "hardcoded" wmv support? iPhone with quicktime?
As i told you, this is not technical, it's political. Now i don't know you, but when you have ever worked in a bigger revenue driven software company every f*cking decision is first made by money. It doesnt matter if something is technically the best solution as long as another solution provides a "benefit" in terms of money, marketshare, whatever the manager thinks will drive the competition away.
MS in particular has proven to be driven by such decisions in the past, why would they change now?
You make it sound like this is a hypothetical scenario, but the codec mandate was removed from the HTML5 spec last June.
The reality is that Microsoft will support h.264, Apple supports h.264, Google supports h.264 (and Theora). Opera currently supports only Theora, but their implementation can support h.264. Mozilla is the only browser vendor that willfully forbids its users from viewing h.264 (or any other format but Theora) in <video>. In addition: Flash, Silverlight, and QuickTime all support h.264.
Bear in mind that the <video> tag has always been codec agnostic and able to support multiple codecs in the same tag. The codec mandate was only to specify a common codec across all browsers, but there is no point in mandating something that won't be implemented.
Last time i checked there a lot of video services out there with subscription/premium service.
Vimeo doesn't charge to watch videos, so far as I know, and that's what triggers the licensing exemption.
But think about it, what will happen then? MS will support wmv by default, Apple will support Quicktime by default, Mozilla theora.
If HTML5 were to mandate Theora support, that part of the spec would simply be ignored by browser vendors who don't want to support Theora. Thus the mandate or lack of mandate in the spec produces no practical difference whatsoever in the end result: Apple's browsers would do H.264, Mozilla's browsers would do Theora, etc., etc.
But on a phone?
Again, it seems unlikely that anyone other than Mozilla will bother with Theora on mobile devices. Apple and Nokia have already taken pretty clear stances against supporting Theora, for example, so what good would it do to put a mandate in the spec? It'll just be ignored.
As i told you, this is not technical, it's political.
You seem to have a misunderstanding of how web standards actually work; without buy-in from the companies which will implement them, the standards might as well not exist at all. That's why HTML5 currently doesn't mandate a video codec; originally it required Theora support, but several major players basically said "if you leave that in there we're just going to ignore it".
Since this is a recurring problem with what you seem to be saying, what's your solution? Any approach to video codecs must take into account the fact that browser vendors can't be forced to ship an implementation of any particular codec, and will make their own decisions independently of what you might like them to do. As far as I can see right now, delegating to the operating system's media framework is the only way to get the sort of broad support that's needed, since those frameworks have to ship with a wide range of codecs already.
(and, honestly, the manual codec install really only turns out to be an issue with Theora; Windows and OS X both ship pretty much everything else out of the box)
Ok, so you don't want to specify the codec. Technically a good reason. But think about it, what will happen then? MS will support wmv by default, Apple will support Quicktime by default, Mozilla theora. This is a freaking nightmare for every enduser! Now on a desktop you can probably tell the user to install the correct decoder (my family/mother/older people certainly would never be able to do that!). But on a phone? So Windows Mobile 7 will ship with "hardcoded" wmv support? iPhone with quicktime?
As i told you, this is not technical, it's political. Now i don't know you, but when you have ever worked in a bigger revenue driven software company every f*cking decision is first made by money. It doesnt matter if something is technically the best solution as long as another solution provides a "benefit" in terms of money, marketshare, whatever the manager thinks will drive the competition away. MS in particular has proven to be driven by such decisions in the past, why would they change now?