HEVC: The Promise of a Future That Never Came

HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding), or H.265, burst onto the scene with a bold promise: dramatically reduced bandwidth needs while ushering in higher resolutions and improved streaming quality. Yet the industry soon discovered that the road to a truly HEVC-centric future was paved with technical, legal, and practical challenges.

A Vision That Outpaced Reality

When HEVC was introduced, its developers claimed the codec could offer roughly double the compression efficiency compared to H.264. In theory, this leap in efficiency should have allowed streaming services to deliver 4K and higher content using much less bandwidth. However, in many real-world scenarios, the bandwidth savings were far from being fulfilled. Practical limitations—such as the variability in encoding practices, the need for high computational power, and imperfect implementations—meant that the dramatic compression gains rarely translated into the broad-scale network savings that had been promised.

The Licensing Labyrinth and Its Costs

One of the most stifling barriers to HEVC’s widespread adoption is its fragmented licensing framework:

Multiple Patent Pools: Unlike H.264, which benefits from a centralized licensing model, HEVC is subject to a multitude of patent pools. Each group demands its own fees and imposes complex contractual obligations.
Unpredictable Royalty Costs: The unpredictable nature of royalty fees meant that deploying HEVC on a large scale could lead to unforeseen expenses. For many companies, particularly in the streaming space, these financial risks outweighed the theoretical benefits of improved compression.
Legal and Administrative Overhead: Negotiating with multiple patent holders introduced legal uncertainties and administrative burdens that further disincentivized a full-blown shift to HEVC.

DRM Integration and the Chrome Conundrum

Digital Rights Management is essential for protecting premium content, yet integrating HEVC into DRM systems proved to be a significant hurdle:

Chrome’s Limited HEVC Support: Google Chrome—one of the most popular browsers for streaming—has not offered robust native support for HEVC. The browser’s reliance on the Widevine DRM system, which has historically favored codecs such as H.264 (and, to some extent, VP9), meant that adding HEVC into the mix introduced unexpected complexity.
Widevine and HEVC Compatibility Issues: Widevine DRM, optimized for other codecs, struggles to provide consistent, secure playback when HEVC is involved. Even with hardware acceleration on some platforms, the gap between theoretical support and practical, reliable implementation left many streaming services hesitant to adopt HEVC exclusively.
Interoperability Concerns: The uneven state of HEVC support across different devices and platforms further complicated content delivery, undermining the consistency of the user experience—a critical factor when dealing with DRM-protected streams.

The Battle of the Codecs: VP9 vs. AV1 and the Return to H.264

For several years, many in the industry explored alternatives to HEVC. Contrary to the notion that VP9 stood as a real contender, its deployment was largely confined to platforms like YouTube. In contrast:

VP9’s Limited Reach: Although VP9 is used successfully on YouTube, its broader ecosystem support has been limited. It never fully emerged as a universal solution for streaming outside of that specific environment.
AV1 as the True Challenger: AV1, developed by the Alliance for Open Media, has stepped into the ring as a genuine challenger. With promises of even greater compression efficiency than VP9—and without the tangled licensing fees that haunted HEVC—AV1 is steadily gaining traction. Its ongoing hardware integration and industry endorsements point to a much more promising future for high-efficiency, royalty-free video coding.
The Practical Choice of H.264: Despite being an older standard, H.264 remains the dominant codec in streaming today. Its mature ecosystem, predictable licensing, and widespread compatibility have meant that the industry still finds it more practical—and far less troublesome—to use compared to HEVC.

Conclusion: Not Worth the Trouble

The story of HEVC is a classic case of unfulfilled promise. While its technical merits on paper are impressive, the codec’s complex licensing, significant DRM integration challenges (especially as seen in platforms like Chrome), and the reality that bandwidth improvements often fell short of expectations have all contributed to its limited deployment. In a competitive landscape where both AV1 and even H.264 offer more practical solutions without the financial and legal headaches, investing in HEVC has increasingly seemed like a risk not worth taking.

For streaming services looking to deliver high-quality video, the lesson is clear: the potential benefits of HEVC rarely justified the trouble it brought along, making a multi-codec strategy—or even a continued reliance on H.264—the more pragmatic choice in today’s dynamic market.

Article written by
Sylvain Corvaisier