> Who would develop those codecs? A good video coding engineer costs about 100-300k USD a year. The really good ones even more. You need a lot of them.
How about governments? Radar, Laser, Microwaves - all offshoots of US military R&D.
There's nothing stopping either the US or European governments from stepping up and funding academic progress again.
It seems that you have a massive misunderstanding of how this works.
University research labs, usually with a team of no more than 10 people (at most 20), are good at producing early, proof-of-concept work, but not incredibly complex projects like creating an actual codec. They are not known for producing polished, mature commerical products that can be immediately used in the real world. They don't have the resources or the incentive to do so.
> They don't have the resources or the incentive to do so.
Of course they have. Guess how MP3 was developed - an offshoot of the German Fraunhofer Institute and FAU Nürnberg-Erlangen, amongst others.
The fact that no one seems to even be able to imagine how funding anything from the government could even work (despite that era being just a few decades ago) is shocking.
How about governments? Radar, Laser, Microwaves - all offshoots of US military R&D.
There's nothing stopping either the US or European governments from stepping up and funding academic progress again.