Why is Sony being left out of the Streaming Future Conversation? Why are we even having it?

[Pemalite]

SvennoJ said:

Pemalite said:

The laws of Physics literally comes into play.

Depends on the encoding algorithms in use and the hardware support to go with it.

The laws of physics add about 4.8 ms for every 1000 km of glass fibre (light travels about 31% slower through fibre optics) or adds 9.7 ms to ping time per 1000 km. Of course that's the maximum speed on the backbone. The number of hops the signal has to go through to get into your house adds a lot more.

You can test it yourself with Azure http://www.azurespeed.com/
While playing you will have a more stable connection of course, this is just a ping test.
Anyway far above the laws of physics as the nearest server is only 100 km away from me at 50 ms average.

Well. You aren't telling me anything I don't know. :P

The Azure test... The closest server is 110ms away from me, hardly ideal.

SvennoJ said:

The better the encoding the more expensive the hardware to encode and decode. Yet those will keep getting cheaper over time. When blu-ray came out you pretty much needed most of the ps3 capabilities to decode h.264. The main cost of early blu-ray players was the power needed for decoding. Nowadays h.265 is in newer phones so decoding should be fine. Efficient real time hardware encoding still asks quite a few resources though. And that while people are getting used to 4K60 on their new 65" HDR tvs. My laptop can't handle 4K60 you tube :/ It will be 1080p60 at most I guess. Aiming for 10mbps is decent quality 1080p60.

There is already a successor to h.265 in the works. Aka. FVC or H.266.
But you are entirely correct. Once the video decoder... Which is generally a fixed function block on the GPU has support for a video codec, hardware requirements will drop significantly.
Otherwise your option is the brute force method which can take up a ton of GPU/CPU cycles.

With that in mind... There are different variants/features included with the h.264 standard as well, every year when GPU's are released, they tend to update their video engines to support the various new features/variants.