I think you have to do a lot more reading about DVD licencing if you think the comparison is apple to apple. You seem to be adding in a lot of your own "ifs" which make it very obvious that you're trying to paint the orange red.

Your example would be akin to comparing MPEG2 to MP3. Codec to codec. "DVD" licencing is not solely MPEG2 however. If you want to do MPEG2 only, then you can still access the data off a DVD, but you're not going to be playing most copyrighted material. Most of the sticky bits of DVD are in there because of the studios. Without the studios there wouldn't be any content, so it wouldn't matter either way.

The Chicken and Egg thing doesn't comlpetely fly. The benefits must be enough to make the choice. And I suppose you think that people producing content, content players and other content-manipulation applications don't make these evaluations?

The biggest threat to MP3 is rapid scaling of storage capacity and communication bandwidth. Non-lossy compressed formats. Multi-channel support in an encoder would also be a future threat (and I understand Vorbis has support for this), BUT, it will wait on the content to become available in the first place. In current installations (and material) it's only suited for (home) theatre usage.

Obviously SB do not feel it is within their interests to include Vorbis if they have to develop it themselves. I don't blame them. It's completely useless for the large majority of their current and future customer base. Now, if it was just a matter of grabbing existing, open code, that's another story. Still some development, but a much more appealing proposition. Still not free, but as close as you're going to get.

Now, since I feel like this topic has been discussed to death and since Peter has given fair words to describe their position, can we let this issue die?

Do you want a practical example? GIF.

Bruno