Video coding is the beating heart of multimedia communication, and despite decades of innovation, it remains a field full of challenges and opportunities. While much research continues to push codec-level efficiency, this talk shifts the perspective to video streaming: how smart decisions about encoding parameters can dramatically boost real-world delivery performance. We explore how content-adaptive bitrate ladders unlock substantial efficiency gains by tailoring encoding settings to each video’s unique characteristics, and how optimizing bitrate, resolution, and frame rate can balance conflicting goals such as visual quality, delivery cost, and energy consumption. We then dive into how these strategies can be brought to life in live streaming using powerful video-complexity analysis frameworks. Finally, we reveal how real-time quality measurement enables intelligent, responsive streaming systems that elevate video delivery and monitoring to a new level.