Comment by mort96

> which i think is fine, as most decompression is on user side, but compression is on server side (and mostly only ever done once!).

This is 100% use case dependent.

For Netflix, compression is only done once and decompression happens a ridiculous amount of times.

For YouTube, popular channels are similar to Netflix; but they suffer from a very very long tail of videos which only get watched a handful of times.

For chat applications, videos may get watched only once by the recipient.

For video conferencing, videos get compressed once (on the client's machine even, so ideally using hardware encoding), then decompressed once per recipient. This use-case also has the issue that every client needs to decode every other client's video stream, so you better send video in a format which every client can quickly decode (ideally using hardware decoding).

Notice how "slow compression is fine because decompressing happens much more frequently" is only true for the Netflix use-case and the popular YouTube channels use-case. For everything else, slow compression is a problem.

(Luckily, at least according to others here, AV1 isn't necessarily slow to encode, it's just the reference implementation that's slow and there are software implementations which match the speed of x264. I haven't verified this though)