>you hit play in Netflix on your phone — how many people would have any way to tell how much of their data plan that used?
Instead of focusing on the client, what about the server? How happy would Netflix be to reduce their outbound traffic by 20%? I'm guessing it's quite happy.
Oh, don’t get me wrong: I love better codecs and I want them to happen. I’m just with the person upthread who was saying H.264 will stick around: Netflix and YouTube can upgrade rapidly because they control the clients and have robust transcoding pipelines: if it saves 10% on bandwidth costs they’ll recoup the work quickly. It’s upgrading everyone else that’ll take awhile, especially since so much video is natively produced as H.264.
Instead of focusing on the client, what about the server? How happy would Netflix be to reduce their outbound traffic by 20%? I'm guessing it's quite happy.