I do remember that period well but there’s an interesting wrinkle: almost everyone with a computer already has a licensed implementation from their device/OS vendor. This is a consideration for anyone encoding video for the web who isn’t already producing H.264 and doesn’t have access to a licensed encoder but that can’t be a very large group of people – and even if it was larger, given the history of things like GIFv I’d be very surprised if the license costs outweighed the huge savings in bandwidth.