Fair enough. If you know it doesn't work for your use case that's fine.
As demonstrated elsewhere in this discussion, GPU HEVC encoding only requires 10ms of extra latency, then it can transit over fiber optic networking at very low latency.
Many GPUs have HEVC decoders on board., including cell phones. Most newer Intel and AMD CPUs actually have an HEVC decoder pipeline as well.
I don't think anybody's saying a self-hosted GPU VM is for everybody, but it does make sense for a lot of use cases. And that's where I think our schism is coming from.
As far as the $2,000 transducer to fiber.. it's doing the same exact thing, just more specialized equipment maybe a little bit lower latency.