$6.5 million per year buys a lot of pants where I come from.

This reminds me about the scare tactics adopted about Congress's earmarks, where a large number was thrown around without context to obfuscate the issue. You need to put the 6.5 million in perspective.

The 6.5 million is for developers of encoders/decoders, not websites (it's capped at 100k for video sites). If you sell a million copies of an encoder, your royalty will be $0.20 times 900k = $180k (first 100k is free). Is it really too much to ask $0.20 for developing most of the technology on which you are basing your business?

For 250K subscribers to a SUBSCRIPTION video site, big bad MPEG-LA wants $25k, CAPPED at 100k for users >1M.

I'm pretty sure this is a negligible amount for a subscription site. And remember, free sites don't pay.

Right. Because the current price they're charging is going to be all that they're ever going to charge until the patents expire.

Or, you know, what's actually going to happen is the price being kept low until H.264 is well-entrenched, and then being jacked up when there's no competition.

So you agree that 100k/6.5 million would not unreasonable for the entity which would be charged that amount?

The linked article addresses inflation also. The licensors agree to not raise royalties by more than 10% per year. Unless you definition of "jacked up" encompasses 10% rise.

I see ideological reasons to support a free standard, but not business ones. YMMV.