> This is overrated - of course that's how you do it, what else would you do?

That's not what has been done previously for adaptive streaming. I guess you are referring to what encoding modes like CRF do for an individual, entire file? Or where else has this kind of approach been shown before?

In the early days of streaming you would've done constant bitrate for MPEG-TS, even adding zero bytes to pad "easy" scenes. Later you'd have selected 2-pass ABR with some VBV bitrate constraints to not mess up the decoding buffer. At the time, YouTube did something where they tried to predict the CRF they'd need to achieve a certain (average) bitrate target (can't find the reference anymore). With per-title encoding (which was also popularized by Netflix) you could change the target bitrates for an entire title based on a previous complexity analysis. It took quite some time for other players in the field to also hop on the per-title encoding train.

Going to a per-scene/per-shot level is the novely here, and exhaustively finding the best possible combination of QP/resolution pairs for an entire encoding ladder that also optimizes subjective quality – and not just MSE.