Great piece of history indeed by our Ben.
If there's someone I'd point my finger against (as an "antagonist") in history that would be Sony and their MPEG-2 pursuit 'till the bitter end.
If it wasn't for Sony, MPEG-2 would have been dead in the water, but after the bitter disappointment of MPEG-4 ASP (i.e XVID) in 2001, most broadcasters didn't gamble with MPEG-4 Part 10 (i.e H.264) in 2004 for SD contents (720x480 29,970i - 720x576 25i) and decided to stick with MPEG-2. Back then, formats like IMX50 based on MPEG-2 All Intra 50 Mbit/s 4:2:2 were popular for SD files.
In 2006, as little as 2 years after H.264 was introduced, the world moved to HD (and then FULL HD) and Sony made the XDCAM set of standard which is essentially MPEG-2 for both HD and FULL HD.
Guess what happened? Many companies wanted "stability" and adopted it instead of H.264, but that was a big, big mistake. As result, most broadcasters are still using MPEG-2 for FULL HD contents to this very day and are hog-tied to this ancient, no longer supported, unoptimized codec with banding problems and what not.
If Sony didn't do this, the world would have moved to H.264 for HD and FULL HD and MPEG-2 would have been dead by now.