My guess is that we'll ideally end up with something that isn't hard to use copyright/patent wise and offers "optimal" quality but at smaller file sizes when compared with the prior technologies, which would be a good thing for both storing your own video files, as well as when handling them en masse in most businesses. After all, if someone could reduce the bandwidth usage of their video hosting or streaming site by 10%, they'd be saving millions in hardware/networking expenses.
Though I don't think that we're at that point yet, many of these more recent technologies are not widely supported, or just not good enough.
For example, I rendered a ~6 minute 1080p video with Kdenlive with multiple codecs, to compare encode performance and resulting filesizes with the default settings:
Codec Time Filesize
H264 2:27 172 MB
VP8 9:34 244 MB
VP9 19:29 332 MB
AV1 FAIL FAIL
IMHO the most pressing issue I have with h264 is that it creates files that are almost always larger than HEVC (or AV1), and everything I own handles H265 without any issues (I think it's also mandated by some DVB standard).
> However, eventually something new is going to come out…
The thing is, human eyes and ears aren’t getting any better and computing performance seems to be plateauing. My guess is we have already reached the “good enough” point and I doubt we’ll get formats 3-4X as efficient in the future.