This paper is quite old and has known problems with setting a constant quantizer for VP9. The results do not match my own findings comparing libvpx and x265 at all [1]. libvpx VP9 is still worse than x265, but the difference is quite small.
We downloaded a random git commit a year before a release was made and claimed it was officially released. Best case scenario, we don't understand the difference between a spec and implementation being finalized. Worst case: intentional hatchet job.
How do the complexity requirements compare? H.265 decoders have memory for lots of previous frames, but VP9 could be at a handicap if the format limits backward references to just a few frames.
BBC apparently does not consider VP9 to be a major video coding standard.
>The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard has been developed jointly by the two standardisation bodies ITU and ISO (as has been the practice with all major video coding standards in the past 3 decades);
And that's probably the right call for the BBC. Hopefully they'll get behind the NetVC [1] effort and support that in the future. The NetVC codec is to be built from Daala and Thor, and maybe VP10 as well. To complement NetVC there's also the Alliance for Open Media [2], but I'm a bit disappointed that the only public output from AOMedia so far seems to be a press release from September last year.
