This seems particularly desperate, but I'm not surprised this is happening, given that patent owners in general have been very angry that H.264 didn't wind up being nearly as lucrative as MPEG-2 was. Hell, I remember the days when they couldn't even agree if H.264 should have a free streaming tier at all or not - and it seems like that went away.

Maybe Google should finally make good on their threat to only stream YouTube in royalty-free standards.