That consumer is perfectly happy with 256 kbps streaming. Any adoption of MQA as a result will hugely increase bandwidth costs for the provider with no net gain in adoption. We are talking 5-10X higher bandwidth.
For any mass dominance of MQA you have to create a plausible scenario of consumers caring about high-res audio en mass and that is just not there. If they did, SACD and DVD-A would have been a huge success.
And how would those millions of consumers enjoy MQA anyway? By apple supporting it? No chance. These guys won't pay a cent to some little company like MQA. And they have the resources to make their own if they wanted.
Have you ever sat across the top executives, engineers and bean counters at these companies like Apple, Samsung, LG, Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, Pioneer, TI, Analog Devices, Intel, TCL, etc. and discuss format adoption? I have. Ain't no way no how will they adopt royalty bearing technology from some high-end audio company spin off like MQA. Even Dolby struggles to get new formats established and this is all they do and they have consumer power like nobody's business.
And then there is the matter of IP/patents. First thing these companies ask for is indemnity. That is, if they ever get sued, they want to just hand it to you and if you lose, they want you to pay all the expenses! They would then look at MQA and say that it doesn't have enough assets to protect them so that is a non-starter.
Next thing they do is say, "hey, we have patents on that technology and we could sue you and the rest of your customers." And proceed to call you a thief for stealing "their" technology.
If by some miracle you generate some success, they get together, create a de-facto cartel and create their own (royalty bearing) alternative. And since they have cross-licensing deals with each other, it doesn't cost them a dime but you would pay deerly if you wanted to adopt it.
And oh, since they created their alternative in a committee, they call that "open" and yours proprietary. 100% get out of jail free card to get out of any antitrust scrutiny.
It doesn't stop there. They will actually create patent pools or go after your licensees individually and say they have patents that read on your solution and you better pay up or get sued.
When I tried to get our technology adopted against all of these odds, one of the most powerful and top executives from a major CE companies pulled me aside and said, "Amir-san, CE business is dirty business!"
Here is an article I wrote for WSR magazine which gets into more of these issues:
https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/politics-of-format-making.1289/
Consider yourself corrected.
I am not at liberty to discuss my post Microsoft experience. Hush money and all.
And sure, I am not in day to day meetings with labels today but ignoring my experience would be unwise.
Bob Stuart knows a bit of this from his MLP/Dolby TrueHD days but he gave all the work to Dolby to perform for them.