The reasons compression is strong: 1) Customers want their service to be cheap, distribution costs for streaming companies are significant and every minute wat

The reasons compression is strong: 1) Customers want their service to be cheap, distribution costs for streaming companies are significant and every minute watched is a sink for the business. Streaming is not a massively profitable proposition, so it's not greed to want to ensure you're business is minimising delivery cost. 2) Most customers struggle to see the quality improvements, it's a law of diminishing returns to add higher quality encoding if so many people don't care. You might care, but if more customers actually noticed then it would be more of a driving force. 3) The lower the bitrate, the more people can get HD. Giving more people access to relatively good quality images drives a lot of innovation in compression, not just cost.