If Google is interested in providing Videolan the necessary code for supporting a better streaming-friendly audio/video codec, I'm ready to give it a shot on my broadcast servers as long as I don't have to pay any exorbitant royalty fees, which is why I won't touch MPEG4/H.264.
I think what google is doing here is putting a spoke in Mcrosoft and Apple's wheels by saying if you sue Ogg Theora on the MPEG4 issue we're gonna launch our own free codec.
It sounds awful political to me and its launch proximity to that potential lawsuit is a little too coincidental if ya know what I mean. -- Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.