Conversations and presentations from the Future of Video Compression ITU/ISO workshop, held in January, made one thing crystal clear—the real disruption isn’t just about video codecs, it’s about the convergence of AI, hardware, and cloud-native delivery. We are no longer in a world where new codecs get away with delivering marginal efficiency bumps and call it a day. As the streaming landscape evolves toward more high-resolution content and more live sports delivered OTT, the real challenge is squeezing every last drop of efficiency out of existing infrastructure (which mostly means the cloud). In last week’s coverage of the ITU/ISO workshop, we outlined the visions of tech giants like Amazon, Samsung, and China Mobile which envision a shift from pre-H.266 (VVC)…