TECHNICAL
to receive regular updates, expanding the profiles to provide additional capabilities. As of today, the standard is at Version 8, published three years ago in August 2021.
Over 96% of consumer video products sold today support HEVC
Penetration of HEVC-enabled Consumer Devices - Installed Base (includes Smart TV, STB, Media Streamer, Games Console, Smartphone, Tablet, PC)
Successors to HEVC
Beyond this, H.266/VVC is the candidate successor to HEVC, developed by a cross-standards group known as the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET for short). This is a partnership between ITU-T Study Group 16 – known colloquially as VCEG – and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29, known as MPEG. VVC will likely follow a similar adoption path to HEVC. Hardware decoders are only just becoming available in consumer products today, plus it takes time for all technology vendors within the delivery chain to optimise their implementations. Consequently, it will take several years for VVC to become a dominant standard, perhaps even into the next decade.
Installed base of HEVC-enabled Consumer Devices Source: Futuresource Consulting
Examining the features of those consumer products already in regular use – known as the “installed base” in research studies – we discover that the penetration of HEVC-capable devices will reach 90% overall in 2023, up from 58% only four years ago. This presents a market of 8.1 billion addressable devices in use globally with HEVC decoding capability. As the market reaches saturation, forecasts show a rise to 9.4 billion devices by 2027, at which point almost all will have native support for HEVC, fourteen years after the standard was first published.
a favourable upgrade path. As a result, the number of HEVC-capable consumer electronics products has been steadily expanding over recent years. In terms of shipments, over 96% of consumer video products sold today have HEVC playback capability, totalling 2.3 billion devices annually; and this is rising year over year. Product replacement cycles are lengthening, partly due to the cost-of-living crisis presently impacting most regions, so forecasts show that it will take a few more years before HEVC support is ubiquitous across consumer products in the market. Essentially, it takes time for older, non-HEVC capable products to be retired.
Consumer device support for HEVC
As part of this study, Futuresource examined the penetration of HEVC across seven primary consumer electronics categories. These include Smart TVs, Set-Top Boxes (STBs), Media Streamers and Games Consoles, alongside those classified as personal electronics products, namely Tablets, Smartphones and Personal Computers/Laptops (PCs). The increase in HEVC penetration Until AV1 became an alternative option, most companies servicing the video industry had expected to migrate from AVC to HEVC, especially for 4K video applications and more efficient digital television broadcast. Furthermore, some of the common design features underpinning H.264/AVC and H.265/ HEVC enabled semiconductor vendors to reuse and extend existing hardware encoder and decoder blocks in their SoCs (system on chips), rather than redesign from the ground up, presenting
Number of addressable Consumer Devices supporting HEVC (2023 forecast)
80
Volume 46 No.3 September 2024
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