Update From the Standards Vice President: Compression
Bruce Devlin
We live in an era where bandwidth and compute power are cheap. Curiously, though, bandwidth and compute power are not growing at the same rate, which means that we can manage costs by exchanging bandwidth resources for compute resources through the use of compression. When MPEG-2 was created, the designers had a fairly clear idea of the memory footprint and chip area, which was reasonable. In 2018, we have a range of different techniques and methodologies for compression that are adapted to different specific needs. Low-latency compression for interactive applications will be optimized differently to multipass offline encoding for scripted content to be consumed on-demand.