Video codecs have historically been like this, to some extent or another. It's really just a manner of if the manufacturer has absorbed it into the price tag or pushed it to the consumer.
No one likes paying for a codec license anyways, but since patents are at play, they kind of have to.
Real example, I recorded the world series using an ATSC antenna, and I re-encoded a 90 second sample using a bunch of different settings on a 32-thread znver5:
# Codec Flags Size Speed
- ----- ----- ---- -----
Original (Raw ATSC mpeg2video) 77MB (100%) N/A
1 libx265 -preset veryslow -crf 24 37MB (48%) 0.245x
2 libsvtav1 -preset 3 -crf 44 36MB (25%) 1.87x
3 libsvtav1 -preset 1 -crf 35 19MB (25%) 0.556x
That said, I've watched so much h264-encoded video over the past decade I think I've been trained to perceive the subtle visual "snow noise" as a sign of a high quality video: I find how AV1 blends backgrounds more visually objectionable than the snow in H265, even though I think it's objectively higher fidelity. Similar to how I find high frame rate video "fake" after having watched NTSC TV for the first half of my life.
Of course there is always VLC
Maybe in audio, but video still seems like an absolute nightmare. Look at the absolute silliness with like having to pay $.99 to play h265 video in Windows.