“It is the result of 30+ years of work with one single goal: To reduce the bandwidth required for transmission of full-motion video.”
Raw 1080p at 60 frames a second is about 370 MB every second, which would fill a 50GB Blu-ray in two minutes. H.264 gets it small enough to stream by throwing away detail your eyes don’t notice and sending only what changed between frames. It runs on every phone, drone and security camera. Nobody thinks about it, which is the best compliment an engineer can get.