Clarifying HEVC licensing fees, royalties, and why vendors kill HEVC support

A complex web of patent pools and licensing fees is causing major tech vendors to abandon the once-promising HEVC video standard. | Contesto: cronaca

Punti chiave

• Clarifying HEVC licensing fees, royalties, and why vendors kill HEVC support

Contesto

Major technology companies are increasingly removing support for the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard from their products, a retreat driven not by technical failure but by an impenetrably complex and costly licensing landscape. This strategic withdrawal, observed across consumer electronics and software platforms throughout the past year, signals a profound breakdown in the system meant to govern one of the most important video compression technologies of the last decade. The standard, also known as H.265, promised a 50% improvement in data compression over its ubiquitous predecessor, H.264, making it critical for 4K streaming, efficient video storage, and next-generation media. Yet, that potential is being stifled not in the lab, but in the boardrooms of patent holders and the legal departments of implementers. The core of the issue lies in the fragmented ownership of the hundreds of patents essential to implementing HEVC. Unlike the relatively streamlined licensing managed by MPEG LA for H.264, HEVC's intellectual property is split between three major patent pools: MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, and Velos Media. Each pool represents different groups of patent holders, including industry giants like Samsung, GE, Philips, Dolby, and NTT. A company wishing to legally use HEVC in a product, from a smartphone to a video editing app, must typically negotiate licenses with all three entities. This creates a multi-layered, often opaque fee structure where the total royalty burden becomes unpredictable and, for many, prohibitively high. The financial demands extend across the supply chain, catching everyone from device manufacturers to content distributors. Royalties are frequently required not just for the sale of an end-user device like a television or camera, but also for encoding content, decoding it, and even for streaming subscriptions where HEVC is used. HEVC Advance, for instance, historically drew fierce criticism for initially demanding royalties on the entire device price, not just the video component, and for seeking fees from content providers—a move seen as double-dipping. While some rates have been adjusted after backlash, the cumulative cost and...

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Categoria: cronaca