H.265 and VP9 will (most likely) have a lot of difference when we consider hardware encoders/decoders. I guess H.265 hardware decoders will be present on all platforms in the next couple of years. There are mobile processors that have hardware H.265 decoder. H.265 encoder seems to be a bit far. I am not sure whether someone has a production ready hardware encoder. On the other hand, VP9 is not a priority for most of the companies.
Netflix has said they are going to use H.265, but they could adopt the same strategy as Google. They could even force their desktop customers to install the VP9 codec, just as they did for Silverlight.
The primary problem is Apple, they simply won't support it. Thankfully, AppleTV hasn't caught fire, relegating their control of the market to the iPhone.
Daala will be more amenable to acceleration via generic GPUs. It probably won't match dedicated hardware but if a mobile device can decode it and the bandwidth savings are significant, the lack of licensing fees will make it a very attractive option.
Hopefully Daala will be significantly better than H.265 and win over Apple and others based on the merit of their codec alone.
Google told us VP8 was the future, and that widespread hardware support was imminent. Then in less than a couple of years they abandoned VP8.
Next week millions of fairly new TVs are going to stop working with YouTube because Google decided to shut down the API: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6098135?hl=en
I'm not sure the TV industry is about to invest in supporting a technology that will probably be long deprecated by the time most of their customers will even be able to use it. Fool me once etc
Because 1080p on a 5 - 6 inch device creates visible pixels to the naked eye, and can be improved upon with a higher quality screen.
I have a 1440p 5.5" smartphone and the difference next to 720p is staggering and the difference next to 1080p is still noticeable to the untrained eye. The tests I use to demonstrate to people include well formed text display, comic-book display, and Unreal4 demo. People pick out the 1440p screen as best without much issue in every test.
[1] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-syste...
The same reason that flagship phones now tend to have screens with resolution greater than 1920x1080. 1920x1080 isn't the highest useful resolution at the size of many of today's phones.
This has nothing to do with merits and everything to do with big business politics. That said in the case the best quality codec ie. H.265 is likely to win out pretty comfortably.
The first was announced few days ago.
