by Paul Gray, Director of European TV Research, Display Search
High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is a video compression standard, a successor to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which will enable improved video quality, double the data compression ratio, and support 8K UHD (resolutions up to 8192×4320).
The ratification of the first draft specification of ITU’s HEVC has been hailed as the dawn of 4Kx2K television. However it is perhaps useful to consider other generations of compression and their effect to evaluate its true significance.
MPEG-2 brought the first mass-market digital video formats (MPEG-1 only ever got brief traction in VCD in Asia), enabling DVD and the first digital broadcasts. However its low compression efficiency also made HD broadcast difficult and only a few countries adopted MPEG-2 HD (Australia, Korea, Japan and the U.S.). Probably its biggest effect was to perfect the VCD concept as DVD.
MPEG-4’s initial breakthrough was celebrated as bringing economic HD broadcasting – in particular to spectrum-challenged Europe, but since then to all new digital broadcast deployments. However, its greatest impact (viewed with a few years’ hindsight) is not broadcast at all, but Internet video: Netflix, catch-up services and YouTube. MPEG-4 had unlocked video from the TV screen.