At last, YouTube will be broadcasting videos in a free format, WebM, consisting of the VP8 video codec plus the Vorbis audio codec in a Matroska container. Google has released their newly acquired VP8 implementation as free software, as well as granted a worldwide, royalty-free patent licence for anyone wishing to implement the specification. This enables browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, which didn't support the h.264 codec due to patent issues, to include native support for WebM to play back YouTube videos using the HTML5 specification.

This is the first time that YouTube video will be able to be played back using free (both from copyright and patent restrictions) software. I must applaud Google for taking this great step to freedom on the web, and hope that they will continue along this path in the future. I also hope that other video hosting websites will follow suit, by adopting either WebM or some other free video format.

This is great news not only for YouTube users, but for the web as a whole, which now has a precedent set for the use of free media formats by a mainstream provider.

Further reading:
The WebM Project FAQ
Free Software Foundation statement on WebM and VP8