2Jqt8XuAkwr I am taking them at face value and providing a technical solution.
I don't think SLR ever said that hosting of 'Original' HBR files was a cost issue that needs solving. And even if they did, we are talking about 600+ scenes and 50 TB which is a tiny percentage of the total amount of data they are hosting and thus certainly not a cost driver.
What creates more costs for sure is providing now AV1 streaming files on top of HEVC for each and every scene. There were like up to 7 different streaming resolutions for HEVC, now it's twice as many for HEVC + AV1. These additive costs for transcoding and hosting cannot be absorbed by putting 1 % of the total data some place else, so the solution to the problem was inventing a new PPV revenue stream.
In my view, there was no real need to introduce AV1 streaming at this point, and it has no benefit as long as HEVC streaming has to be maintained in parallel. So if hosting costs are really an issue, SLR should think about putting AV1 streaming on ice until the last Q2 has been scrapped. Btw, on Steam Q2 still is the dominant device with more users than Q3 and Q3S combined.