"Helping The Web" in this case would be choosing the video format with the broadest support base... which in this case is H264. The only holdouts are Opera and a couple variants of Firefox. As a bonus, you'd get hardware acceleration in almost all mobile devices and a good chunk of the desktop market.
Every time I've read the paperwork that came with a device that was able to create H.264 files, the words in the paperwork prohibited me from creating H.264 files with that device and using those files for commercial use. If I wished to use those H.264 files in a commercial setting, I was required to make a separate agreement with MPEG LA.
VP8 has no such restrictions. Google has said on multiple occasions that VP9's licensing will be the same as VP8's. The VP8 and VP9 codec software is released under a BSD license. The VP8 format specification released under a perpetual, irrevocable royalty-free license. [0] Despite VP8 and VP9's marginal inferiority to H.264 [1], they should be the default video format on The Web.
WRT hardware acceleration, the Nexus 5 has hardware assist for encoding and decoding VP8 [2]. Several Smart TV's decode VP9. [3] Given that manufacturers won't have to kowtow to MPEG-LA, the number of devices with hardware assist for VP8 and/or VP9 will continue to grow.
We could have had the royalty free H.264 baseline we were originally promised if people didn't keep doing the web-tech equivalent of negotiating with terrorists.
If you really want to use their tech on the web, stop letting them dictate terms.
