There's a lot of focus here on Bink, but Oodle has a fascinating history as well. From world-class compression ratios/decompression speeds to being implemented in hardware by Sony in all PS5s. RAD have a great history of getting exactly the right people that are interested in their fields and are great at what they do.
I echo the sentiments of many when saying I am surprised no one had scooped them up earlier (although I doubt it wasn't for lack of offers).
Ehhh, I mean it's not cheap, but definitely within the realm of reasonableness for a funded semi-indy game - and to be fair, if you're creating enough assets that using Oodle makes a substantial saving to your disk/memory footprint (i.e. your game package is in the multiple GB range) then probably you have some money to pay all those artists, so hopefully you can afford Oodle. If you're doing a pixel art or retro game, it's probably not worth it.
The biggest pain in the ass with Oodle is recompressing everything after you integrate it, that first time takes FOREVER.
I too find those companies weird. They seem to have nice product, website boasts how nice it is, but: no publicly available documentation, evaluation SDK, no pricing, only thing that's there is sales@ address. And while their product might be good it isn't really unique. Why I would jump hoops to use it while I can likely implement video playback from libavcodec and generic compression with zstd or LZ4 faster than their sales people will reply?
You're making a lot of assumptions. You can probably get a free trial just by emailing them, and you will be in direct contact with the dev who actually wrote the tool. A number of their devs have/had blogs where they were constantly talking about the development of the products etc. First of all these guys are superstars in the games industry, so everybody knows about them, and secondly they are super approachable and responsive.
I echo the sentiments of many when saying I am surprised no one had scooped them up earlier (although I doubt it wasn't for lack of offers).