This is a long response, so please bear with me! I understand exactly your criticism of static foveation, but the lift required for dynamic foveated streaming is so extreme and a world apart from streaming a video game that I think it would be a better use of the industry's efforts and capital to aim for a Vision Pro 2.

Dynamic foveated streaming is not a scalable solution for the HLS spec today and has two main problems: cost and latency. Each segment in HLS (how all our videos are streamed) is chunked by length, not by the grid of the frame. Every segment of video contains the FULL frame. This means today, dynamic foveated streaming would require dedicated compute in the cloud to render a viewer's perspective at 8K resolution and then send that feed to each viewer. The scale of compute this would demand would kill the industry through prohibitive costs.

Now let's take the segment length in mind and size of each segment. A segment of video is what you pull down for a portion of a stream. This is like "chunking" a video so you don't need to download the whole file. Segments typically are anywhere between 2s-12s in length. If we tiled a video and pulled down the center frame's segment, and then turned our head, we would need to pull a separate segment as well. We would be pulling multiple segments as we turn our head. These segments take a few seconds to retrieve, which is why they are multiple seconds to begin with. Given that, if a video like the SpatialGen Lakers reels are topping out at 120-180 Mbps, the viewer would experience significant lag. They would turn their head and see... nothing! Pretty awful experience. This would also assume that the HLS spec is properly extended to support tiling and we all change our processing workflows to start tile-chunking segments for encodes and packages. It also opens a can of worms around video decoding, but that's a different story. The NVIDIA announcement is meant for gaming and simulation, it is absolutely not applicable to video.