For tech giants optimizing for transit, the complexity and engineering costs of improvements are easily paid for by even small savings, and because it's just tr

For tech giants optimizing for transit, the complexity and engineering costs of improvements are easily paid for by even small savings, and because it's just transit, you can support multiple formats simultaneously. And everything you do is ephemeral: You could have a new codec every day and not ruin any archivist's day with long term support requirements (excepts the ones they try to shake off anyway). TLDR: for Youtube, transit bw is expensive and rapidly evolving codec cornucopia is cheap enough to cover with the bw savings.