Wow, this seems like a very backwards move. Just when the truly open source VP8 was set to go in WebRTC, we're opening the discussion about putting h.264 in there again? Why?!
That's just it, it's not apparent that IETF will mandate VP8 in WebRTC even without Cisco's offer here. Nor can Mozilla go it alone, Chrome has already announced they will also support H264.
As Monty himself put it on his personal blog, in the matter of VP8 vs. H264, VP8 lost. This is an appreciated measure by Cisco to mitigate the damage until Daala can be fielded to proactive displace whatever MPEG LA tries to push after H264.
What guarantee is there that a codec which doesn't even exist yet won't lose to Microsoft/Cisco/Nokia/et al the next time we need to standardize a MTI codec in some spec? This seems wishful thinking.
On a purely technical level, Opus' performance blew the pants off the other options, which surely helped. If Daala can repeat that performance I think they have a good chance.
Well, the fact that Skype and Cisco were already onboard and using it helped a bit and that audio codecs don't have the kind of deployment challenge that displacing H264 does.
Surely, the argument is going to come around in 2015 or whenever Daala ships that H264/H265 hardware is too widely deployed on billions of mobile devices to justify a new codec.
Does Cisco really want to WebRTC to succeed when it clearly commodifies their WebEx offering? The question is, what are they getting by ensuring H264 is MTI?
What Mozilla and Google were going to get out of VP8 winning was pretty clear. So one has to ask what their motivation is for spending so much money to keep H264 as MTI.
This seems like a very short sighted move.