I see what Basschick is trying to do. However the raw processing power that would be required to do it would overwhelm a server or actually group of servers.

Just look at how slow sitedepth is to diaplay images now. Imagine if it had to process images on the fly?

As Alex pointed out, are images really the problem? It's videos that that are the issue and with any attempt we made (DRM etc) it has just proven to be a nightmare for the consumer.

I was looking at some images that were processed with some form of coding and actually talked to the site owner as to why they appeared to be sharpened. I guess it was the encoding.