Comment by condiment

Modern video codecs are what broke the telco monopoly on content and gave us streaming services in the first place. If the cdn bill is make or break, the service isn’t going to last.

And there’s no transfer of effort to the user. Compute complexity of video codecs is asymmetric. The decode is several order of magnitude cheaper to compute than the encode. And in every case, the principal barrier to codec adoption has been hardware acceleration. Pretty much every device on earth has a hardware-accelerated h264 decoder.