Even if all High Profile patents in Europe expire next year, this means absolutely nothing for US-based companies/orgs or companies/orgs that trade in the US, which still has patents that won’t expire until 2027 according to this article. Even then, this means absolutely nothing because there is no such thing as a H.264 decoder/encoder that only supports the High Profile spec (aside from OpenH264, which already circumvents the patents for companies/orgs that want to use it, but is still lacking). x264 supports H.264 features from later specifications, and the patents for those things likely won’t expire until after 2030.