The compression MP4 (or any other modern video format) offers is much better than what you can obtain with GIF. MP4s are, perhaps surprisingly, actually the better choice in terms of bandwidth and load time.
Yes, the same HD content is better as MP4 than GIF, but in the past a "typical" GIF loaded much faster than a typical video. It may even be true (any experts?) that there is an effective lower limit on video quality/framerate for MP4 that prevents it from being the super fast novelty juice that a low-quality GIF could be.
GIF is expensive to transport but cheap to decode. Compression that is in a sense more appropriate for video is the other way around. You may blow through a data cap (people still have these) quickly with animated GIFs, but at least you can put a hundred of them on a web page and have them all play. Eventually. If the downloads ever finish.
What he is talking about is that back when gifs and videos were both postage stamps pushed over modems, gifs won out.
But what changed was that people simply started ripping frames from HD videos, dumping them into gifs and plastering them all over social media.
End result was that the gifs ballooned in size because they now held many more images, and each images was much higher resolution.
What is more wacky is why gifs returned to fashion at all. They were dead for nearly a decade after people stopped doing their own web sites, and used gifs for things like animated "under construction" signs.
> What is more wacky is why gifs returned to fashion at all. They were dead for nearly a decade after people stopped doing their own web sites, and used gifs for things like animated "under construction" signs.
Same reason that H.264 won the web video standards war: mobile.
While mobile browsers can now embed videos reliably that wasn't always the case, and if there's one thing mobile users hate it's links opening other apps. GIFs allowed "video" content to be displayed inline easily in a mostly universal fashion.
