>>106858013
Because despite the fact that we Do have cheap as chips disk space and tons of Compute and network, compression is important because it saves resources. You still have to buy those resources, and to maximize our utility, we compress files. IN Enterprise, that means more VMs or code can be backed up to a given unit of disk space, more per tape.
Video is the same way. Most video compression formats were invented to save disk space, because if you can figure out how to ditch 50+% (or more) of a video, with maybe only a slight dip in quality the average user would never notice, why not? Or imagine you are a streaming company like Netflix, you would definitely be interested in investing billions into newer video codecs to transmit video to end users with less bandwidth specifically so you could serve more customers. FLAC Is the same way. Take an audio signal and compress it with an algorithm designed for it, you end up cutting half the data requirements in exchange for fairly minimal CPU usage when playing the file to decompress.