The history of media (and especially video) on the Internet was certainly not built on royalty-free formats or protocols. The stuff has been a problem for decades, and it's only recently that things have gotten better.
Of course it was. It was delivered by HTTP (royalty-free), RTSP\RTP\RTCP (royalty-free), and TCP/IP (royalty-free) and depended on DNS (royalty-free) and HTML and friends (royalty-free). Video over the internet wouldn't have worked without royalty-free formats and protocols supporting it.
Video format patent pools just wanted to extract value off the top. It's been grubby.
