[PetahNZ]

My server will encode 1,000,000 images itself, but each client will only decode like 10.

[bombcar]

But you may have fifty million clients, so the total "CPU hours" spend on decoding will outlast encoding.

But the person encoding is picking the format, not the decoder.

[lonjil]

But the server doesn't necessarily have unlimited time to encode those images. Each of those 1 million images needs to be encoded before it can be sent to a client.

[okamiueru]

That isn't saying much or anything.