HEVC : how long before it hits the mainstream?

Analysts are beginning to argue about when HEVC will reach the mainstream market. Frost and Sullivan thinks that a critical mass of adopters could take 3 years and that it may be at least 5 years (2018) before consumers see widespread HEVC support in their electronic devices. On the other hand, Ryan Lawler of Techcrunch expects devices with HEVC support to become widely available in around 18 months, with rapid adoption thereafter.

Many chip manufacturers have been closely involved in the standardisation process for HEVC and are already gearing up for production of HEVC-compatible devices. Will the performance gains offered by HEVC be enough to prompt device manufacturers, service providers and users to switch over to the new standard? If so, how quickly will the shift happen? What do you think?

The HEVC standard has been approved

"Geneva, 25 January 2013 – A new video coding standard building on the PrimeTime Emmy award winning ITU-T H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC was agreed by ITU members today".

The ITU-T has announced approval of the new High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. The new standard will be co-published as Recommendation ITU-T H.265 and ISO/IEC 23008-2.

HEVC is intended to be a successor to the popular H.264 / Advanced Video Coding standard, first published in 2003. As with every video coding standard, the performance of HEVC depends on the way it is put into practice. The developers of the standard, a consortium of ITU-T VCEG and ISO MPEG known as the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding, are expecting HEVC codecs to offer around twice the compression efficiency of H.264/AVC. That means approximately half the bandwidth for the same video quality.

You can download a draft of the HEVC standard and the reference software codec here.

- Iain Richardson