What I find really frustrating about this is that the whole premise is supposed to be about how using older technology can be more environmentally friendly, yet

What I find really frustrating about this is that the whole premise is supposed to be about how using older technology can be more environmentally friendly, yet they used a newer codec that simply wasn't appropriate to the task they threw at it to give the impression of "old" while wasting more resources. And to throw one final nail in the coffin, if they used a modern, but reasonably mature codec like VP8, they could have done even better on resource usage while retaining the same quality. If you want to build something to demonstrate that using older technology has advantages, that's fine. But you should make sure that you're actually demonstrating what you intended. And I'd pick something other than energy efficiency to target, because the last decade has seen a ton of technological progress improving energy efficiency because of its importance to mobile devices running on tiny batteries.