This is amazing to me from an outsider's point of view; I thought Binomial was a two-person shop (idk if they expanded recently). To be able to partner with Google and Chrome Media on an equal level just doesn't seem possible to me. Binomial must have some pretty nice tech. Congratulations on the partnership!
Well, they fixed a problem none of the GPU makers is interesting in solving directly: providing a common image compression format for 3D rendering. This is all a patent-encumbered mess, and the reason we are in this mess are the GPU vendors alone.
When Microsoft still had power over desktop computing, it pretty much dictated GPU vendors to use the DXT image compression format which is supported on all desktop GPUs, but nothing similar has happened on mobile.
In the current situation, this problem couldn't have been solved from the "inside". It isn't a trivial problem by far to solve (probably one of the few topics in programming that deserve the name "rocket science"), but it also doesn't require a huge workforce or standardization committee (and thank goodness this hasn't been "designed-by-committee"), "just" many years of focus and dedication.
