There was one final workshop at last week’s Picture Coding Symposium 2021 that Faultline could not resist dipping into. After all, who can ignore what Netflix has to say about the future of video compression – at such a critical juncture in streaming history. Kyle Swanson, an encoding engineer at Netflix, posed a simple yet strange question to attendees of such a highly technical industry event – is improving video compression still relevant? He produced a satellite image of the sun rising over the earth, showing quite a bit of banding artifacts, something you wouldn’t see with the naked eye but are common encoding artifacts observed on a daily basis by the Netflix encoding team when looking at compressed videos.…