A new report says there is evidence that adoption of the ten-year old HEVC standard is now expanding.
Spotlight on HEVC, commissioned by InterDigital and written by Futuresource Consulting, says the codec and its ability to enable higher picture quality has been picked up by streamers including Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Apple, Paramount and Warner Bros.
After a slower than anticipated start, the codec received a boost after Google added native support for HEVC video decoding in its Chrome web browser, mirroring Apple’s continued support for HEVC in Safari.
According to Futuresource, Until AV1 became an alternative option, most companies servicing the video industry had expected to migrate from AVC to HEVC, especially for 4K video applications and more efficient digital television broadcast.
Some of the common design features underpinning H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC enabled semiconductor vendors to reuse and extend existing hardware encoder and decoder blocks in their SoCs (system on chips), rather than re-engineer their technologies.
It means from the ground up, presenting a favourable upgrade path. As a result, the number of HEVC-capable consumer electronics products has been steadily expanding over recent years.
Over 96% of consumer video products sold today have HEVC playback capability, totalling 2.3 billion devices annually.
