[26fingies]

It can be worth deprioritizing encode complexity since the majority of audio and video streaming is non-live content. Youtube, Netflix, TikTok, Instagram, and so on can all benefit even if encode is slower than realtime. Obviously there are cost-benefit considerations here but they are doing AV1 so they are willing to accept some hit on compute costs as a trade for bandwidth costs.

[sobriquet9]

A lot of that footage is originated on smartphones, GoPro, drone cameras, etc. where hardware and power limitations do not allow one to run expensive encoding algorithms.

[ReactiveJelly]

So the smartphone does a crummy H.264 encode that's bit-expensive but power-efficient, then the YouTube server saves the bits a million times over by transcoding to AV1. There's still room for at least 2 codecs on the Pareto curve.

[26fingies]

Yes, exactly.