An Analysis of the Impact of HEVC on Existing Media Businesses

In 2013 the MPEG consortium ratified the h.265 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) compression standard, and manufacturers are beginning to implement this. The paper examines the likely adoption curves and timelines for viable HEVC-based television, mobile and PC/laptop-based audiences, and covers both the consumption/decoder and operator/encoder domains. The paper uses a percentage-based approach for all analysis, modeling and prediction, to identify “inflection points” rather than quantify a number of units and to give the findings a wider applicability. Analysis shows that mobile phone and PC/laptop-based video audiences already have sufficient processing power on their devices to handle software decode of most 720p/1080p HEVC video content, with tablet audiences reaching this point by late 2017. Mobile phone-based audiences will be over 95% hardware decode capable by 2017, with tablet audiences reaching this point by 2020 and PC/laptop audiences by 2021. Television-based audiences (whether via Smart TV or other attached device such as STB, Blu-ray player or games console) will be 10% hardware decode capable my mid-2016, 50% capable in mid-2019 and 95% capable by 2023.

Published

2015-07

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

HEVC, h.265, codec, adoption, timeline, service delivery, h.264, AVC

DOI

10.5594/M001596

ISBN

978-1-61482-955-3