If you (Amazon, in this case) can put it that way, it seems like throwing them 10 or 20 thousand a year would simply be a good insurance policy! Any benefits you might get in goodwill and influence are a bonus.
But on a more serious note, it is crazy that between Google and Amazon they can not fund them with 50k each per year, so that they can pay people to work on this.
Specially Google, with Youtube, they can very easily pay them more. 100k~200k easily.
And they get the tool + community good will, all for a rounding error on any part of their budgets...
That is why I said easily 100~200k. It will be a rounding error for them.
It is actually crazy that Google is not already hiring the main dev to work on ffmpeg with all the use they give it on Youtube.
I also wonder if it is maybe used by Netflix also.