Pretty sure the GP meant only once for the encoding of each resolution. He was just pointing out the asymmetry of the work, YT only encodes once per distinct r

Pretty sure the GP meant only once for the encoding of each resolution. He was just pointing out the asymmetry of the work, YT only encodes once per distinct resolution it shows, each of these encodings can be decoded by clients millions of times if the video is popular enough to bring in that many clients.