>get snapped up by a single owner.
If these things were as trivial as you think, then why doesn't open source simply patent all the good new ideas now?
Even if these easy to create ideas you think exist required some previous work, at least these new simple patents would free up stuff eventually.
But this doesn't happen. Ask yourself why.
Heck, spend some time and try to make a better method your self, and patent it. Then you can hold for-fee patents needing your brilliant idea hostage, and change the playing field.
Or maybe you're mistaken on how hard and non-trivial the needed components are?
And, if they're so non-trivial that open source, or Google, or whomever want them to be free, then the ideas are worth patents.
>That's because it takes so long to get implemented,
You think it takes longer to implement a compression codec than to create it? That's not true for this scale (I've worked on several high end compression codecs and have designed and implemented probably a few dozen compression codes in my career).
Creating one is by far the hardest part - trying tons and tons of ideas (coding them all up for testing), looking for new ideas, working on how various ideas interact, etc.
By the time the spec is solidified probably a few hundred throwaways have been made. Implementation is trivial, then optimization takes some time.
But neither effort, by far, approach the effort it takes to design one on this scale.
> There would be less total incentive, but there's still the enormous incentive from everyone working with video to get better compression/quality, and streamlining cooperation would be a big deal.
If that were true, you'd see all those same actors improving x264 compression, or MP3, or h265, and other compression codecs, but they are not. Improvements, despite being something ANY person can do and push to open libs, is rare. Most all modern compression schemes only define the decoding part, allowing improvements on the encoding side to be continually worked on. The technical skill to do so is non-trivial, and a tiny, tiny fraction of a percent of "everyone working with video" has any idea how to improve it.
This is how x264 kept improving and improving over and over for H.264 compression - there was pretty much one person, Dark Shikari, that worked on it for years and years to improve it.
If you want to see how terribly complex this work is, read his (internet archive) blog on the work. It was fun at the time watching one person make x264 the premier H.264 compressor.
But pretty much zero other besides him made significant improvements to it, despite being something anyone can work on.
So no, the vast majority of people working with video would be useless at making anything better.