Worst offender being Google, who toggled on VP8 / VP9 decoding on YouTube despite the vast majority of devices only having h264 hardware decode.

The aggregate waste in battery wear and watts spent is pretty staggering when you think about it, all so google could spend a few cents less per 100 streams.

Or they could just send the video uncompressed and then it would take even less hardware resources to decode on the client side. Why, in a sense it would be a lot more like decoding analog television signals at that point. (Not least of which since few clients would have the network bandwidth to handle more than 360-480p of that ;)