There is a lot to be said (and concerned about) the seemingly acceptable performance of streams like mp3 and the move to ever less quality of video streaming.

I was an early proponent of video on the web and I was anxious to see quality come first. As we all know now, that is not what eventually happened. Then cell phones and their camera-cannibalization tactics came along! Ugh! Revolting developments.

I think the public has begin to wise up and I predict there will be a return to commercial success with some quality improvement. But not likely to be where I would like it to be - the convenience and speed of slightly less quality is a very big draw,like sweet icing on a sweet delicious cake. It can not be avoided.

Because vinyl had much superior quality to quality to, say, reel-to-reel, right? :) TV was superior to film? Come on, the average media people have always consumed was always much lower quality then the highest end stuff. Even the lower quality junk of today is higher quality then the 80's.

2gb consumer internet delivery right around the corner... The internet everywhere Clinton promised over a DECADE ago hasn't happened and now we're going to have 2gb delivery? Where, to a couple thousand? A bunch of countries with hundreds of thousands of people shoved in a land mass no bigger then the average US state?

H.265 promises to deliver the same [I]perceptual[/I] quality at 50% of the bandwidth of H.264. I dare say to achieve that it will be at a lower mathematical quality. Also important to remember this is a delivery codec not an acquisition codec. Mostly the encoding / decoding will be done in purpose made hardware in real time. I think quite a few mobile phones already have the silicon in them to decode it and the hardware encoders are also already out there. Given the increasing demand for mobile bandwidth I cannot see how it will not happen. Keep in mind here many mobile phones have 1080p resolution screens!

As for OTA broadcasting, if that is around in another decade I'll be a bit surprised.

I cannot speak for the rest of the world but down here we're slowly rolling out our National Broadband Network which is fibre to the desktop. 100MB/s to 1GB/s will be available. Over the air broadcasters will simply not be able to compete.

On the acquisition side bit rates are going up and up, cameras such as the F55 which is hugely popular chew up terabytes of storage. Even the FS700 can now be tricked out to record 4K in 10bit Clog. So why are we shooting higher quality images that'll be compressed to within an inch of its life on tiny screens? Simply because the better the image is to start with the better it holds up to being compressed.

I'd also not say the public is moving away from wanting quality images. Cinema screens are getting bigger and that means more resolution. I rather think the public is more discerning today, they want more for their money. They're time poor so they either want entertainment that rocks but can be watched on the train to work or in a cinema with a massive screen and sound that near blows them out of their seats.

Back to H.265, I cannot fathom why it will not be a part of the future. It's not like Joe Average really cares how the video he's watching on his mobile phone or tablet is encoded. There's certainly the silicon around to make it happen, the average mobile phone today has 4 cores running at over 1GHZ so even without a dedicated decoder, H.265 shouldn't pose any challenges.

Bob.