Despite increasing computing power, high quality media still presents a storage problem. If the raw file is compressed to piss poor quality with an algorithm, the same algorithm could be used to faithfully (or with a margin of error outside our sensorial capabilities) live upscale the media file back while you are playing it. So you could have a full 8k video library resting on 720p files, lossless audio coming from 192kbps files, and stuff like that, a quality good enough to embed for piss poor connections and processing power, but that can be locally live upscaled by the algorithm on better devices.
ps: Upscaling media is already real, it’s just bad at the moment. Funny to see people believing it won’t get better. How easily are you still telling AI videos apart from the real thing without the aid of professional tools? Just a year ago it wasn’t so difficult.
Conceptual Reading Recomendation - lossy compression vs lossless compression.
So low quality lossy upscaled to high quality lossy on the go, that any difference would only be found by meticulously inspecting the spectrogram. Even the most snob FLAC enthusiasts on hyper high end hardware already fail A/B tests with 320kbps mp3 anyway
MP3 is very high quality lossy compression because of the psychoacoustic modelling to know what our brains don’t process when hearing, and dropping only that. This includes frequencies outside of our hearing range and effects like masking where loud noises of a certain frequency mask adjacent frequencies. The compression only loses the parts no one hears.
Your post, while not specific, was talking about video. Lossy video compression loses quality that we can perceive. Upscaling can help with some of it, but you can only interpolate so much.