When Cutz, a French video-compression start-up founded five years ago, was selected by France TV for its RG Labs demonstration, ears pricked and eyes widened at the arrival of a new kid on the block. Cutz bills itself as an eco-responsible video encoding platform. Thanks to machine-learning-driven compression, it promises exceptional visual quality at higher performance while reducing costs and, potentially, carbon footprint. Cutz CEO Laurent Breboin is himself involved with the Shift Project, a French non-profit created in 2010 to limit climate change and reduce the economy’s dependence on fossil fuels. For the record, the project has made bold statements in the past. Many people assume that lowering transmitted bitrate reduces infrastructure power consumption; however, Greening of Streaming (another…