HEVC

HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding, H.265) is a video compression standard finalized in 2013 by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding, a partnership of ITU-T and ISO/IEC. HEVC approximately doubles the compression efficiency of H.264, enabling 4K and 8K video at bitrates that broadcast and streaming infrastructure could support. Technically, it extends the block-based architecture of previous standards with larger coding tree units (up to 64×64), more sophisticated motion compensation, and parallel processing tools.

Yet HEVC's technical merits were overshadowed by its licensing catastrophe. Three competing patent pools emerged with overlapping claims, and numerous patent holders declined to join any pool. The resulting uncertainty made HEVC economically unviable for many applications — particularly web streaming, where per-stream licensing costs scale unpredictably. This failure of collective action was not incidental. It was a direct consequence of standardization processes that allow participants to declare essential patents after the standard is fixed, creating a hold-up problem that no participant can unilaterally solve.

HEVC's licensing chaos became the case study that motivated the formation of AOMedia and the royalty-free design of AV1. In this sense, HEVC's greatest impact on video technology was not compression efficiency but regulatory failure — a demonstration that the existing standards-development model had reached the limits of its viability.