[strogonoff]

That might be true; however, if this takes hold I would be surprised if they choose to keep producing and shipping the tasty grain high fidelity footage.

Considering that NR is generally among the very first steps in development pipeline (as that’s where it is the most effective), and the rest of dynamic range wrangling and colour grading comes on top of it, they might consider it a “waste” to 1) process two times (once with this new extreme NR, once with minimal NR that leaves the original grain), 2) keep around both copies, and especially (the costliest step) to 3) ship that delicious analog noise over Internet to people who want quality.

I mean, how far do we go? It’ll take even less bandwidth to just ship prompts to a client that generates the entire thing on the fly. Imagine the compression ratios…

[Thorrez]

That argument could be made to reject any form of lossy compression.

Lossy compression enables many use cases that would otherwise be impossible. Is it annoying that streaming companies drive the bitrate overly low? Yes. However, we shouldn't blame the existence of lossy compression algorithms for that. Without lossy compression, streaming wouldn't be feasible in the first place.