The End of Video Coding?

1) They have a fairly limited catalog (contrast with the constant ingestion of new content by Youtube, for example)

2) The cheapest way for them to ensure they have sufficient capacity to handle peak loads leaves them with a lot of extra compute during non-peak times. That excess compute is essentially free.

This annoys me quite a bit. Because then it list out the so called large-scale video encoding from Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. As if Video Encoding are only done by OTT providers. And the Video Encode from iPhone ( Consumers ) TV broadcast ( the good old content distributor ), livestream of events from Sports to Olympics.. etc doesn't matter. It is a very Silicon Valley mentality, and shown in AOM / AV1. After all they are creating their own codec for their own use. While other industry codec organisation will have to take care many "edge" use case.

>So how will we get to deliver HD quality Stranger Things at 100 kbps for the mobile user in rural Philippines? How will we stream a perfectly crisp 4K-HDR-WCG episode of Chef’s Table without requiring a 25 Mbps broadband connection?

It is interesting this 100kbps bitrate and rural Philippines comes up. Because this is the exact same quote from Amazon's video specialist Ben Waggoner mentioned on Doom9.

Shouldn't we be a little more realistic with the bitrate? We have 20 years of experience and research and yet we still don't have a single Audio codec ( two dimensions ) that could perform better then MP3 128Kbps at half the bitrate. Opus only manage to slightly edge it out at 96kbps, and that is with selected samples. There is only so far we can go, 100Kbps is barely enough for Audio. And we have Massive MIMO, and 5G, both will bring immense capacity increase to current Network. There is so much in the pipeline to further increase efficiency, capacity, lower latency, cost, and power. It is a little hard to think designing a 100Kbps for Video.

Currently Youtube streams 1080p AVC @ ~2.2Mbps. Which seems to be fine with most people already, especially on Computer / Tablet or Smartphone Screen Size. HEVC can probably do similar quality with 1.5Mbps. VVC should be aiming at below 1Mbps. Netflix is doing 15Mbps 4K Streaming with HEVC ( And people are complaining about quality already, I have no idea why I don't watch Netflix) VVC should really be aiming at better quality with 8Mbps. We should aim we specific bitrate and resolution with Real World Encoder as anchor, and specific quality to achieve.

Assuming you have 20/20 vision, You won't be able to tell the distance between 4K and higher unless your screen fills more than about 40 degrees, in which case you are losing detail at the edges.

An 8K monitor on your desk may make sense -- if you're say 3' away from it and it's say 60", you'll start noticing a difference between 4k and 8k, however you will be focused on one area of the screen, rather than the entire screen.

Even with 4K, for most people watching television/films the main (only) benefits are HDR and increased temporal resolution (60p vs 60i/30p)

All the 8K stuff I've seen comes with 22.2 sound to help direct your vision to the area of the screen wanted. It certainly has applications in room sized screens where there are multiple events going on, and you can choose what to focus on (sport for example).

If you were to buy a 32" 8K screen - say the UP3218K, about 28" wide, to get the benefit of going above 4K you would need to be sat within about 30 inches. At 30" you would have the screen filling about 50 degrees of vision. Even an immersive film should only be 40 degrees.