It would be interesting if we ever ended up in a situation where compression is so expensive that only studios/distributors are able to throw the kind of CPU po

It would be interesting if we ever ended up in a situation where compression is so expensive that only studios/distributors are able to throw the kind of CPU power at the problem that's needed to do it in a reasonable amount of time. I'm sure they wouldn't mind consumers being faced with having to spend 2x as much storage/bandwidth for unauthorized versions (or get less quality in the same file size). Though I'd bet such a state would only serve to spur distributed encoding schemes to ramp up…