H.264 has royalties that you need to pay to produce a licensed encoder.
Then it has _separate_ royalties you have to pay to take content encoded with a licensed encoder and send it to someone else.
Furthermore, whether an encoder is "licensed" depends on what you do with its output; the details are in the license that came with your encoder.
The statement you linked to is that the royalties on sending to someone else don't have to be paid as long as you're giving it to them for free and sending it over the internet _and_ your encoder is licensed for whatever else is going on (e.g. if you're making money in the process then your encoder has to be licensed for that).
I'm saying that to produce the content in the first place you have to pay money to the MPEG-LA. If you don't, then anyone you send it to has to pay money to the MPEG-LA. Here "has to" just means "they can sue you and will win if you don't, since the licensing terms don't allow you to do that". They might, of course, not sue you. That's up to them.
Further, most encoders out there are not licensed to produce content you make money from (note that this is NOT the same as charging users money). So you'd have to buy your camera, then pay the MPEG-LA for an encoder license that allows commercial use. This is a one-time payment. Then you could stream the resulting encoded media as much as you want and not have to pay for each download that happens. The per-download fees are what they waived.
You completely misinterpreted that. First, the author pulled ads out of his ass -- there's no legal statement to support that theory. Second, the statement from MPEG-LA that I linked to trumps that article -- as long as you're not charging for H264 encoded content you have nothing to fear.