And... patents.
As far as encoding technology goes, this is pretty exciting. Looking forward to the first wave of 4K TVs & cell phone cameras hitting the market.
(Disclaimer: I'm the cofounder of a startup specializing in high quality cellphone videos)
More info here: http://luma.io
So while it won't do Free software any good the situation won't be much worse than for AVC unless Google/Motorola or Samsung win in their current cases with Microsoft and Apple about the meaning of FRAND commitments. If FRAND commitments are weak or loose many companies may fight to get the biggest slice of the benefit which could effectively kill the standard.
The competitive pressure of RF formats against H.264 drove the licensing fees _very_ low (with many use-cases made no cost, but even the w/ fee cases are basically 1/10th the AAC royalty rates). H.265 looks like it will have many more patent holders too. But it will likely be several years before there exists an even incomplete H.265 pool license, so it may be a while to see how much worse (or better) the rates are compared to H.264.
If hardware manufacturers choose H.265, VP9 and Daala will be marginalized purely because of performance concerns.
If, on the other hand, VP9 or Daala can be implemented in hardware cheaply enough and with good enough electrical characteristics, perhaps OEMs can be persuaded to use it.
H.265 merely standardizes on a set of the best known compression techniques that meet certain compression vs processing constraints. It just so happens that most of these techniques are patented. Which in turn is why MPEG-LA exists. This will continue to be true going forward. The only way to make a free codec viable is to fix the patent system. I'm all for patent reform, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I'd much rather discuss h265 tech here, and leave the patent debate for the numerous posts we're sure to continue to see on HN.