but if its something that's requested / viewed a lot thats probably something don't want to be compressing/decompressing all the time. Neural networks still take quite a lot of computational power and require GPUs.

If its something you don't necessarily require all the time its still probably cheaper to just store it instead of run it through a ANN. You just need to look at the prices of a GPU server compared with storage costs on AWS and the estimated run time to see there is still a large difference.

I mean I could be wrong (and I'd love to be since I looked at a lot of SR stuff before) but that's sort of the conclusion I reached before and I don't really see anything has significantly changed since

> but if its something that's requested / viewed a lot thats probably something don't want to be compressing/decompressing all the time.

You're compressing only once. Decompression is usually way less expensive and that happens on the client, so without additional cost to netflix/youtube.

Of course this does not mean youtube must use it on all the videos including the ones with 10 views.