As part of a compression suite, that may not matter all that much. I can think of a hybridized version of this that starts with this ANN and then applies 'fixes' by a traditional video codec stream. If the ANN can represent most of the bits of the frame pretty well, the ANN + Codec data can match a traditional codec-only approach with substantially less data.
The thing is that diff between the film and "encoded" version look pretty fuzzy/muddy and so compressing that diff would have to be difficult.
Anyway, the article doesn't mention this idea, the first hn discussion had someone claim some other ridiculous use of the fuzzy/muddy images that are supposed to mean something and ultimately I'd say it's an example of "my research project has cool images, I can use them for publicity".
