Developers, and even device manufacturers, don't really have much of a say in this.  The problem is that many applications these days are in processing power constrained devices - netbooks, smartphones, set top boxes.<p>For example, at the moment I'm working on a set top box.  The processor is simply unable to handle 720p decoding.  We need to rely on the decoder built into the chip to make it happen.  And that decoder only does license-encumbered formats.<p>Because there are a lot of devices that fall into this category, content providers are pretty much constrained to generating content in the formats handled by hardware, which in turn reinforces the use of these formats in hardware.<p>Really, the only way out of this loop would be for the big-league device manufacturers - Apple, Sony, Samsung, etc to decide to change format.  They don't seem to want to, so the rest of us are stuck with h264...