What we really need is this
Edge -> Massive Compression
3G -> Small Compression
WiFi -> No Compression
So it's a sliding scale, the better the speed, the better the images/video.
This is how youtube is meant to work, at least on a computer, it calculates your speed and offers video at a quality that can stream well.
The issue may be with the network operators. They want people to use use less bandwidth and this is one way of restricting it.