HappMacDonald parent
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 ;)
It wouldn't have taken less hardware resources, because would you look at that.. we find h264 hardware decode even in bottom-of-the-barrel mobile CPUs. Pure CPU and even GPU decoding of video codecs is enormously expensive powerbudget-wise.
Not to mention the fact that a mobile radio would have to be kept on high power constantly to pull in that 1Gbit/s stream.
You can be snarky all you want, it was a terrible move by Google.
;)