HEVC, AV1, VVC: How to Make Sense of 2019's World of Codecs

ArticleID

133589 - click to preview View Count: 43737

Title

Author(s)

Jan Ozer (4247)

Alternate URL

Standout URL

Images

Note

Image Size for Social Media Use
1200 x 628 pixels

Make Top Featured Article

Article Helper

Related Issues

Issue Helper

Summary

<p>This article discusses the current status of HEVC, AV1, and Versatile Video Coding (VVC), essentially reviewing the last 12 months of progress for each. You&rsquo;ll learn where each codec is from a development standpoint, where it plays, how long it takes to encode, what it costs, and how the encoding quality compares. For perspective, however, let&rsquo;s take a look at how the codec market has changed over the last few years and what this means for codec adoption.</p><h2><strong>What Matters</strong></h2><p>The two most successful codecs of all time were MPEG-2 and H.264, both standards-based codecs primarily formulated for the broadcast market, with streaming irrelevant for the former and an afterthought for the latter. Standards are critical for broadcast to bind together the plethora of vendors in the encoding, transmission, and decoding spaces. Although each codec bears a royalty, the royalty was reasonable, and the single patent pool was well-managed and transparent.</p><p>Now, streaming has overtaken traditional broadcast and will soon supplant it. Although standards are as important for streaming as they are for broadcast, the standard-setting process is different. Two companies, Apple and Microsoft, control the technologies incorporated into their respective desktop operating systems. Two companies, Apple and Google, control the technologies deployed in their respective mobile operating systems. A handful of companies&mdash;including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Roku&mdash;control the technologies deployed in their OTT devices. Playback of video from Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube is a must-have feature for all living room devices, so the technologies used by these vendors must be supported by TV sets, OTT devices, and set-top boxes.</p><p>In essence, H.264 was born on third base, with little realistic chance of failure, and scored. To continue the metaphor, HEVC was born on second base but has failed to score due to a series of self-inflicted blunders. VVC starts at the back of the pack with other codecs that don&rsquo;t have the MPEG imprimatur. The message? Standardization no longer ensures success.</p><p>Also, the economic value of additional compression efficiency is dropping rapidly. It wasn&rsquo;t all that long ago that content delivery networks charged 50 cents per GB for delivery, so cutting the data rate of your video meant real savings. Now, volume prices are well under a penny per GB, making the cost of adopting additional codecs harder to recoup.</p><p>The same argument is true from a QoE perspective. When bandwidth to the home averaged under 3Mbps and mobile devices connected via 3G, the ability to deliver 1080p video with HEVC or VP9 as opposed to 720p with H.264 was potentially meaningful. Now, bandwidth to the home averages over 14Mbps in the U.S., and 5G is around the corner, again reducing the end-user benefit of a more efficient codec. So, even doubling compression efficiency hasn&rsquo;t proved to be a sufficient motivator for the vast majority of producers to adopt a new codec.</p><p>Perhaps this is the reason that codec adoption is driven by the ability to access new markets, not to reduce operating expenses&mdash;to make money, rather than save money. VP9, which is about 30% to 40% more efficient than H.264, is compatible with 86.39% of mobile and desktop browsers (according to the site Can I use). And yet, Encoding.com reports that its VP9 production <em>decreased</em> from 11% in 2016 to 5% in 2018. Although 78% of Apple mobile devices can play HEVC, Encoding.com reports that only 3% of the video it packaged into HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) format in 2018 was HEVC.</p><p>When Adobe integrated H.264 into Flash in 2007, it seemed as if the entire web video market transitioned to the new codec within months. Today, 12 years later, H.264 still comprises 82% of all video produced by Encoding.com. So, while codec researchers loudly tout small efficiency gains, and marketers crow about each new compatible platform, few video producers seem to care beyond a handful of the world&rsquo;s largest subscription video-on-demand (SVOD), ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD), or user-generated content (UGC) platforms.</p><p>The next holy grail will be the codec available on sufficient platforms to allow publishers to encode to a single format and to finally leave H.264 behind. In an NAB Show interview reported on Streaming Media, <a href="https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=131163">Twitch&rsquo;s Yueshi Shen shared that his company is hoping to do this with AV1 by 2024</a>.</p><p>What conclusions can we draw from all this? That the business models that supported the past success of standard-based codecs no longer matter. That most streaming producers adopt codecs that open new markets as opposed to reducing OpEx. That playback ubiquity will be the most important factor for the codec that replaces H.264. At this point, it seems likely that whichever codec replaces H.264 will bear a royalty, so the one with the most affordable and rational royalty policy will likely win.</p><p>Through these lenses, let&rsquo;s look at how HEVC, AV1, and VVC have advanced over the last year or so.</p><h2><strong>HEVC</strong></h2><p>The HEVC bitstream froze on Jan. 25, 2013. Six years later, HEVC plays in 16.57% of all browsers tracked by Can I use (<strong>Figure 1</strong>). In contrast, H.264 plays in 96.96% of all browsers, while VP9 plays in 86.39%. If you had to choose one datapoint to show the harmful result of a disastrous royalty policy, this would be it.</p><p><img src="https://dzceab466r34n.cloudfront.net/Images/ArticleImages/InlineImages/124845-CodecWorld1-ORG.jpg" width="750" height="253" alt="" /></p><div class="page" title="Page 78"><div class="section"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><em>Figure 1.&nbsp;Browser support for HEVC as of May 28, 2019</em></p></div></div></div></div><p>Mobile support for hardware-accelerated HEVC decode, as measured on Aug. 23, 2018, by ScientiaMobile, was <a href="https://www.scientiamobile.com/growing-support-of-hevc-or-h-265-video-on-mobile-devices/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">78% for iOS devices and 57% for Android</a> (<strong>Figure 2</strong>) and has obviously increased from that point. However, while Apple has made HEVC playback available in the iOS Safari browser, simplifying access for all streaming producers, no Android browser appears to support HEVC playback (Figure 1), meaning HEVC playback on Android will mostly be via apps. This is fine for the top tier of OGC and premium content sites that typically deploy via apps, but complicates HEVC usage for sites that deliver via the browser.</p><p><img src="https://dzceab466r34n.cloudfront.net/Images/ArticleImages/InlineImages/124846-CodecWorld2-ORG.jpg" width="750" height="411" alt="" /></p><div class="page" title="Page 78"><div class="section"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><em>Figure 2.&nbsp;Hardware- accelerated HEVC playback support by mobile platform</em></p></div></div></div></div><p>In terms of HEVC usage, in <a href="https://go.bitmovin.com/hubfs/Bitmovin-Video-Developer-Report-2018.pdf?submissionGuid=f41efe3c-7a1b-465e-8a1e-8eab839e4ad1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Bitmovin&rsquo;s &ldquo;Video Developer Report 2018,&rdquo;</a> 42% of the 456 respondents said that they deployed video using the HEVC codec, but this doesn&rsquo;t indicate the percentage of video actually deployed in that format. In its <a href="https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/H.264-Continues-to-Dominate-and-AV1-Is-Looking-for-a-Day-Job-131048.aspx">&ldquo;2019 Global Media Formats Report,&rdquo;</a> which details the results of its 2018 production, Encoding.com says that 12% of all video produced in 2018 was HEVC, but presents some optimistic predictions: &ldquo;Last year, the majority of HEVC usage we reported was in testing and development; however, in 2018 we can report that HEVC has been promoted to many production workflows and we anticipate a very substantial increase in volume in 2019 driven by UHD HDR content as both premium HDR standards Dolby Vision and HDR+ map to the HEVC video format.&rdquo;</p><p>As previously mentioned, Encoding.com also reports that HEVC comprised only 3% of the video it encoded for HLS delivery in 2018. All of this fits with the narrative above: Producers are deploying HEVC to deliver upgraded formats to new devices, but not to harvest the bandwidth savings or reduce OpEx.</p><p><strong>ENCODING AND TRANSCODING</strong></p><p>On the encoding front, HEVC benefited from the introduction of <a href="https://01.org/svt" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Intel&rsquo;s Scalable Video Technology (SVT)-HEVC codec</a>, which dramatically accelerates software-based encoding for systems running Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Xeon D processors. I&rsquo;ll talk more about Intel&rsquo;s SVT technology in the AV1 section of this article.</p><p>The last year has also seen an increase in the availability of hardware-based HEVC transcoding, enabling higher-density cloud transcoding of live streams. At the 2019 NAB Show, we saw an <a href="https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/NAB-2019-NGCodec-Talks-Hardware-Based-High-Quality-Live-Video-Encoding-131160.aspx">FPGA-based solution from NGCodec</a>, as well as <a href="https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/NAB-2019-NETINT-Talks-High-Density-H.265-Encoding-131157.aspx">SoC-based solutions from NETINT</a> and <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn-media.softiron.com/doc/SI-DS-2019-HyperCast.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">SoftIron</a>.</p><p><strong>INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY</strong></p><p>The past 12 months saw little change in HEVC royalty policies from the three HEVC patent pools or independent intellectual property (IP) owners. Probably the biggest holdup relates to content royalties, which two of the pools (MPEG LA and HEVC Advance) have indicated they won&rsquo;t charge&mdash;MPEG LA for any content, and HEVC Advance for delivery via non-physical media like streaming.</p><p>At the time of this writing, 6 years, 4 months, and 4 days after the HEVC bitstream was frozen, Velos Media&rsquo;s website still states, &ldquo;As it relates to content, we will take our time to fully understand the dynamics of the ecosystem and ensure that our model best supports the advancement and adoption of HEVC technology.&rdquo; One might suggest that the company hire an MBA or two to figure this out. Or, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, you probably don&rsquo;t need an MBA to know which way the wind blows. As I reported in my blog post titled <a href="https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Post/Blog/HEVC-IP-Owners-Are-Killing-the-Golden-Goose-Over-Royalties-131923.aspx">&ldquo;HEVC IP Owners Are Killing the Golden Goose Over Royalties,&rdquo;</a> all you had to do was attend a few sessions at Streaming Media East to hear multiple publishers swear off HEVC due to uncertainty relating to content royalties.</p><p>That said, perhaps Velos Media has been too busy to clarify its status on content royalties, as patent watchdog organization <a href="https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2019/5/20/velos-media-patent-likely-unpatentable" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Unified Patents has filed challenges on more than 30% of Velos Media&rsquo;s known patents</a>. One challenge, relating to about 5.5% of Velos Media&rsquo;s known patents, has already passed the initial hurdle. Specifically, on May 16, 2019, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office&rsquo;s Patent Trial and Appeal Board found that Unified Patents <a href="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/ptab-filings%2FIPR2019-00194%2F8" target="_blank" rel="noopener">&ldquo;has shown a reasonable likelihood that it will prevail with respect to unpatentability&rdquo;</a> and ordered a trial.</p><p>As it relates to HEVC IP policies and royalties, the phrase &ldquo;situation normal, all fouled up (SNAFU)&rdquo; comes to mind. That&rsquo;s the way it was back in 2015 when the second pool (HEVC Advance) launched&mdash;and the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) formed&mdash;and that&rsquo;s the way it is today.</p><h2><strong>AV1</strong></h2><p>AV1, of course, is the open source codec from AOMedia. It launched in 2018, and the last 12 months have seen improvements in encoding time and decoding efficiency. Not seen are dramatic signs of encoding efficiency. Of course, the big news was the launch of a pool claiming royalties on AV1 deployment, so let&rsquo;s start there.</p>

<p>On March 27, 2019, Luxembourg-based <a href="https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-News/Sisvel-Launches-Patent-Pools-for-VP9-and-AV1-130840.aspx">Sisvel announced two new patent pools</a> offering licenses on patents &ldquo;relevant to the VP9 and AV1 specifications.&rdquo; The pools apply solely to consumer display devices, like smartphones, computers, and TVs, and consumer non-display devices, like set-top boxes, dongles, and graphics cards. The standard rates for VP9 are &euro;0.24 for display devices and &euro;0.08 for non-display devices, while the rates for AV1 are &euro;0.32 and &euro;0.11, respectively. (The rates in U.S. cents are similar.)</p><p>The pools represent IP from JVCKENWOOD Corp., Koninklijke Philips, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., Orange, and Toshiba IPR Solutions. According to a Q&amp;A with the Sisvel CEO, the <a href="https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=130849">Sisvel pools won&rsquo;t charge for content</a>, but haven&rsquo;t ruled out charges for software-based playback. (Author&rsquo;s note: As <a href="https://streaminglearningcenter.com/codecs/transparency-alert-i-will-be-working-with-sisvel.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">detailed at Streaming Learning Center</a>, the author is providing some editorial consulting services to Sisvel.)</p><p>When AOMedia announced the release of AV1, it also announced the formation of a legal defense fund for any patent-related litigation, so the Sisvel pool is hardly surprising. No one has sued anyone yet, so the defense fund hasn&rsquo;t kicked in. The next major development will be when Sisvel files a patent list, which should occur by late summer or early fall 2019. Once the list is filed, other IP professionals can start to review both the veracity of the patents and whether they apply to AVI and VP9. Until then, the only real effect of the Sisvel announcement is that all potential users are on notice that AV1 may not be royalty-free.</p><p><strong>AV1 BROWSER SUPPORT</strong></p><p>Since Google and Mozilla are both AOMedia members, it&rsquo;s not surprising that Chrome and Firefox support AV1 playback. Throw in support from the Opera browser, and AV1 now plays in 35.28% of all browsers, according to Can I use (<strong>Figure 3</strong>), with more coming soon. That is, in March, Google announced that Android Q, now available in beta, &ldquo;introduces support for the open source video codec AV1. This allows media providers to stream high quality video content to Android devices using less bandwidth.&rdquo; This seems to indicate that support will be playback-only, not for recording.</p><p><img src="https://dzceab466r34n.cloudfront.net/Images/ArticleImages/InlineImages/124847-CodecWorld3-ORG.jpg" width="750" height="321" alt="" /></p><div class="page" title="Page 79"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><em>Figure 3.&nbsp;As of May 2019, AV1 played in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, accounting for 35.28% of all browsers.</em></p></div></div></div><p>In November 2018, Microsoft released the <a href="https://www.onmsft.com/news/beta-version-of-av1-video-codec-released-in-windows-10s-microsoft-store" target="_blank" rel="noopener">beta AV1 Video Extension</a>, which allows AV1 playback on Windows 10 devices. No word on when this will be added to a Windows 10 update for broader distribution or if or when AOMedia member Apple will add AV1 to its computers or devices.</p><p>Hardware support for AV1 encode/decode wasn&rsquo;t scheduled to appear until mid-2020, about 2 years after the bitstream freeze, and it appears to be on track. Note that browser-based playback has proven to be more efficient than many pundits predicted, which bodes well for AV1 adoption for browser-based playback. In October 2018, StreamingMedia.com reported that 1080p playback of an AV1-encoded YouTube video on Chrome <a href="https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/HEVC-VP9-AV1-and-VVC-Presenting-a-Codec-Update-in-11-Charts-127956.aspx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">consumed about 20% of CPU</a> on an HP ZBook notebook powered by a 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon E3-1505M v5 CPU. A few days later, I reported on my blog that playback of the same video on the same notebook on Firefox <a href="https://streaminglearningcenter.com/codecs/playing-av1-firefox-nightly.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">consumed about 10% to 15% of CPU resources</a> (<strong>Figure 4</strong>).</p><p><img src="https://dzceab466r34n.cloudfront.net/Images/ArticleImages/InlineImages/124848-CodecWorld4-ORG.jpg" width="750" height="554" alt="" /></p><div class="page" title="Page 80"><div class="section"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><em>Figure 4.&nbsp;AV1 playback&nbsp;on an HP ZBook powered by a 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon E3-1505M v5 CPU</em></p></div></div></div></div><p>On May 23, 2019, Mozilla announced the <a href="https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/05/firefox-brings-you-smooth-video-playback-with-the-worlds-fastest-av1-decoder/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">integration of the dav1d decoder into Firefox</a>, which should drop the required CPU resources even further. Mozilla also reported that 11.8% of video playback in Firefox Beta used AV1, up from 3% in March and 0.85% in February. Much of this traffic likely comes from YouTube, which <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyqf6gJt7KuHBmeVzZteZUlNUQAVLwrZS" target="_blank" rel="noopener">posted an AV1 playlist</a> in September 2018. In addition, Google software engineer Steven Robertson promised at Demuxed 2018 that YouTube would distribute 1TB per second of AV1-encoded video by the end of October 2018. Netflix also released some AV1-encoded video for public consumption in September 2018.</p><p>As we reported in 2018, however, Netflix encoded its 1080p video to 6.7Mbps, while YouTube was at 5.1Mbps, so neither company was pushing the quality envelope. Although <a href="https://engineering.fb.com/video-engineering/av1-beats-x264-and-libvpx-vp9-in-practical-use-case/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Facebook claims that AV1 saves 51% when compared to x264</a>, and 32.5% when compared to VP9, the company hasn&rsquo;t publicly stated that it is shipping AV1-encoded video. At this point, a year after the bitstream freeze, we don&rsquo;t know if any company is achieving the bitrate savings reported by Facebook at any kind of scale.</p><p>We do know that encoding times have dropped dramatically. When StreamingMedia.com first looked at AV1 encoding back in August 2018, <a href="https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/AV1-A-First-Look-127133.aspx">encoding times were 45,216 times longer than real time</a>. This <a href="https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=130284">dropped to 147 times longer than real time</a> in tests from March 2019. Just before the 2019 NAB Show, <a href="https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video-News/NAB-19-Netflix-and-Intel-Release-SVT-AV1-Codec-as-Open-Source-131033.aspx">Intel and Netflix announced SVT-AV1</a>, which they claim is capable of real-time 4K/60p 10-bit encoding when running on Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Xeon D processors (<strong>Figure 5</strong>).</p><p><img src="https://dzceab466r34n.cloudfront.net/Images/ArticleImages/InlineImages/124849-CodecWorld5-ORG.jpg" width="750" height="393" alt="" /></p><div class="page" title="Page 81"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><em>Figure 5.&nbsp;SVT-AV1 is reportedly capable of real-time 4K/60p 10-bit encoding on certain Intel CPUs.</em></p></div></div></div><p>What&rsquo;s the quality hit? At this point, it&rsquo;s unknown, but the qualitative difference between SVT-AV1 and the AV1 version shipped by AOMedia should diminish over time. Here&rsquo;s why.</p><p>According to the BBC, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2018-06-comparison-of-recent-video-coding-technologies-in-mpeg-and-aomedia" target="_blank" rel="noopener">AV1 was built with Google&rsquo;s VP9 specification as a base</a>. To this, different &ldquo;tools&rdquo; are proposed by various AOMedia members for inclusion in the codec. Necessarily, at least at first, the successful tools are bolted into the codec architecture as opposed to integrating for maximum encoding efficiency. This is why AV1&rsquo;s encoding times skyrocketed during the codec development process.</p><p>Intel&rsquo;s SVT was designed to enable <a href="https://01.org/sites/default/files/documentation/scalable_video_technology_for_the_visual_cloud.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">&ldquo;the encoder core to be split into independently operating threads</a>, each thread processing a different segment of the input picture, that run in parallel on different processor cores, without introducing any loss in fidelity.&rdquo; This speeds encoding on multiple-core CPUs like Intel Xeons. However, the porting of AV1 to the SVT architecture starts with the core functions and adds different tools over time. For this reason, version 1 of any SVT codec won&rsquo;t produce the same quality as a mature version of the same codec, but should catch up over time.</p><p>So, over the last 12 months, AV1 has demonstrated encoding and playback efficiency and substantial browser support, but also the prospect of royalties on the horizon.</p><h2><strong>VVC</strong></h2><p>VVC is the next-generation (after HEVC) standards-based codec developed jointly by MPEG and the ITU. <a href="https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/standards/exploration/future-video-coding/requirements-a-future-video-coding-standard-v1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The quality target is 30% bitrate reduction over HEVC</a> at the same perpetual quality. Although the codec isn&rsquo;t scheduled to ship until the end of 2020, some quality comparisons have already started to arrive.</p><p>The findings from the aforementioned BBC study are shown in <strong>Figure 6</strong>, with JEM standing for the VVC Joint Exploration Model and HM the reference HEVC model. As described in the 2018 International Broadcasting Convention paper titled, <a href="https://zenodo.org/record/1494930#.XVd6qvpKjUK" target="_blank" rel="noopener">&ldquo;An Overview of Recent Video Coding Developments in MPEG and AOMedia,&rdquo;</a> the study included both objective and subjective tests.</p><p><img src="https://dzceab466r34n.cloudfront.net/Images/ArticleImages/InlineImages/124850-CodecWorld6-ORG.jpg" width="750" height="422" alt="" /></p><div class="page" title="Page 82"><div class="section"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><em>Figure 6.&nbsp;The BBC found HEVC (HM)&nbsp;and AV1 to be about the same, with VVC (JEM) substantially better than both.</em></p></div></div></div></div><p>At HD resolutions, the BBC found AV1 to be only 7% more efficient than HEVC, with VVC 33% more efficient than HEVC. At UltraHD resolutions, AV1 was only 2% better than HEVC, while VVC was 27% better. For those who care about such things, the BBC is both a member of AOMedia and a licensor member of the MPEG LA HEVC patent pool.</p><p>When reconciling these findings with Facebook&rsquo;s, note that the BBC used reference encoders for its VVC and HEVC testing, which are encoders that use every tool in the codec. As such, encoding times are too lengthy for commercial use. In addition, the BBC used standard test clips that promote comparability among different test generations, in essence, testing encoders no one will ever use for production encoding with clips no consumer will ever watch. In contrast, Facebook analyzed 100 of its most popular test clips using actual production encoders, which makes it a completely different test.</p><p>On the licensing front, one would assume that contributors to VVC include many of the same companies in the HEVC and H.264 pools. To help avoid the issues experienced with HEVC, a group of companies formed the Media Coding Industry Forum (MC-IF). As <a href="https://www.mc-if.org/our-goal" target="_blank" rel="noopener">stated in a press release</a>, &ldquo;MC-IF will initially focus on establishing VVC and related standards as well-accepted and widely-used standards, for the benefit of consumers and industry.&rdquo; One key goal is to &ldquo;Provide a forum for, and encourage, the discussion of issues related to the licensing of intellectual property rights relevant to the deployment and use of these Standards, in the furtherance of the Purpose.&rdquo; While laudable, MC-IF has no teeth, so the impact of the organization remains to be seen.</p><h2><strong>A Future Decided by ... Patent Attorneys?</strong></h2><p>To a great degree, the codec future will be dictated by AV1&rsquo;s royalty-free status, which AOMedia could secure by proving that member companies truly reinvented the wheel with AV1 or by licensing technology as needed. Remember that Google used this latter tactic to <a href="https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=88324">cease the formation of a VP8 patent pool by MPEG LA</a> back in 2013. Or perhaps AOMedia can garner enough control over AV1&rsquo;s IP to distribute AV1 with a fair and reasonable royalty.</p><p>If not, it&rsquo;s likely that many of the same IP owners behind H.264, HEVC, and VVC own technology used by AV1. This suggests a truly dystopian future in which IP owners attempt to impose HEVC-like business terms on AV1, VVC, and future codecs. You&rsquo;d like to think they learned their lesson, but 6 years, 4 months, and 4 days after the release of HEVC, they haven&rsquo;t seemed to.</p><p><em>[This article appears in the July/August 2019 issue of</em> Streaming Media Magazine <em>as "2019: A Brave New (Codec) World."]</em></p>

Authors