Remember all those non-FAANG entities who deployed HEVC and VP9? Yeah, me neither. AV1? Eh. VVC? lol.

Are newer, more complex codecs, even useful for anyone but megcorps? Have we reache The End, like we have for audio codecs, where only telcos are interested in lowering bandwidth more, to save money? Have we reached the point where the compute/bandwidth costs will never make sense again small/medium players, who are too big for hardware encoding, too small to reap the benefits of software encoding, and too small to invest in bespoke hardware? Similarily, does anyone under the age of 50 work on codecs anymore? Have we made the barrier to entry so high that you need to spend 10 years banging your head against esoteric papers to understand everything in VVC? Are we all doomed to glue things together? Are video codecs dead? This is an open question. Let’s discuss. This talk was presented at Demuxed ’22, a conference for video nerds in San Francisco featuring amazing talks like this one. Demuxed ’22 was made possible by sponsors like our Platinum sponsor Daily (https://daily.co) and organized by people from Mux (https://mux.com). For more information about the conference and community, see https://2022.demuxed.com. Transcript