Interesting! If nowadays, pictures are colorized by hand in photoshop, it wouldn't be practical to colorize a full black and white movie. I guess this deep learning approach would solve this problem and colorize old black and white classic movies.
Agreed. I imagine this has applications in compression as well. You could stream a movie (or a football game) in black and white and enable each device to color it on the spot. A similar technique could also be done for HD/3D/VR.
I'd like to see more than colorization. Consider the silent movie "Wings". Very high quality blu-rays are available of it. I would colorize it, remove the dialog cards and dub the dialog, then add foley sound effects and a music soundtrack!