[Omniusaspirer]

It's simpler and more space efficient to just transcode according to the desired quality setting and device profile of the viewer. Unless you're a large streaming service or have an extremely uniform profile of users it's not practical to store all the possible variants you might need to cover the full range of devices and stream qualities.

[aaravchen]

It would be interesting for there to be the option to see what formats your historical clients do support, allow selection of a set of them to generate a best common format list for, and all configuring your server to automatically transcode new content to some of those formats. I suspect many of us have a few high-quantity or quality-outlier consumers that it would be useful to be able to pre-transcode newer content, that's the most likely to be consumed, for.