Codec Wars Panel
Ian Nock

Codec Wars

Headlines of the last 12 months in the video encoder world have somewhat been dominated by three letters – AV1. That has led to a whole lot of discussion about the codec wars that are taking place with the Alliance for Open Media on one side and HEVC on the other.

On May 9th 2018, I took part in a panel discussion at the TV Connect Conference addressing this particularly after the big launch of AV1 from the Alliance for Open Media back before NAB in March, and its coming out party at NAB in April. Hell I went along to the launch party myself, and I have the stickers and T-shirt to prove it.

The panel was representative of the key parts of the TV industry, with content provider/streaming platform operators (Jeff Web of Sky and Abi Bhat of Dazn) mixing it up with encoder (Dror Gill of Beamr) and codec vendors (Guido Meardi of V-Nova) as well as myself (the independent view). Abi held court and led us through key questions that set the scene around whether a Codec war was even really happening, and the key takeaways were:

  • It is not a war, it is normal competition returning to the market
  • HEVC and AV1 are not ‘neck and neck’, they are in different phases of development as HEVC is maturing in the market and AV1 is just out of the gate. The view I have is that it is a science project that is up to 5 years back from the current state of HEVC maturity. Similarly other new codecs are coming down the pipe including VVC, but that is only just starting today
  • HEVC’s major challenge has been the licensing cost and the confused licensing situation with three patent pools and a whole bunch of non-aligned companies who state the ownership of IPR in it. There are still has some issues with that, but many operators have appreciated the recent changes by HEVC Advance (one of the three licence pools) to simplify and reduce the costs of licensing HEVC. Now that is resolved, the need for the alternatives has significantly lessened in urgency for many operators
  • AV1, although royalty free, still has an unclear long term licence and almost certainly some cost implication for many as there are likely to be some IP owners who will be looking at AV1 very closely now that it is out in the open
  • AV1 has significant performance challenges at this stage on the encoding side but work will continue to optimise now it is out of the gate with the bitstream having been standardised. There are also a lot of parties involved in this with the breadth of the AOM membership and key parties who are very energised to make it a success
  • AV1 however is still many years away from deployment in hardware form in clients, whereas AVC is almost universal and HEVC has a significant market penetration, particular for the support of UHD and HDR
  • AVC/H.264 defines an era where we have had incredible stability and focus on a single codec (although there were still others including MPEG2) but this has been almost unprecedented – the more normal situation is having multiple codecs, each with its advantages, disadvantages and different level of maturity and position in the market
  • There are other codecs in the market, such as VP9 (the predecessor of AV1) and, running quietly out of the view of most, AVS2 – the HEVC equivalent Codec which has been developed in the Chinese market, and which has significant support there. In addition there are enhancements to baseline codecs such as V-Nova’s Perseus amongst others that offer features that some may see as desirable. These will be looked at by many for resolving the needs of businesses with codecs

Reviewing my own thoughts after the panel, the aim of having a single codec for every use case is definitely a fallacy – something that was thought to be possible by some, but in reality there is significant downside from a use case perspective – in effectiveness, innovation and competition. In the immediate situation today the codec of choice is still actually AVC/H.264 but for specific applications and services HEVC is significantly being brought into play to support important enhancements such as UHD and HDR. In addition both of these codecs are supplemented by the application of improvements in encoding effectiveness and efficiency such as is brought by Content Aware Encoding (also known as per-title encoding). AV1, immature that it is, has also a place in some instances and that will grow as it matures.

In the short to medium term, HEVC has the crown over AV1 but that will be re-evaluated in the 2021-2023 period and AV1 will be looked at then by many in the context of the market at that point, as well as the use cases that different codecs may be optimised for such as mobile versus fixed device usage, on demand versus live, and UHD versus HD.

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Published by Ian Nock

Ian Nock is the Managing Director of Fairmile West Consulting, and has over 25 years experience in high technology research, development, and operations. Since entering the TV industry in the late 1990s, he has worked in the delivery of many Satellite, Cable, IPTV and OTT video platforms across Europe in diverse roles that encompass technology and operations from production to consumption. Ian moved into consulting in 2004 working with some of the most innovative vendor and operator companies in the industry. He founded Fairmile West Consulting (www.fairmilewest.com) in 2012 as a multi-national, high expertise Digital TV and Media consulting and professional services company, working with large/small operators and technology vendors on product/technology strategy, architecture, and delivery. Taking an early interest in the development of Ultra HD, Fairmile West has been a member of the Ultra HD Forum since 2015 and Ian is the Chair of the Ultra HD Forum Interop Working Group. Ian is also the Chair of the IET Multimedia Communications Technical Professional Network. Ian graduated with a First Class Bachelors Degree in Engineering Technology in 1992 from Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University), undertaking research into medical automation, flexible packaging dynamics and post graduate research into artificial intelligence based control systems with a number of published papers in those areas. He quickly jumped out of academia into the nascent Internet and Networking industry before moving into TV. He is a member of the IET, IEEE, RTS and Fellow of the SCTE: The Society for Broadband Professionals. He blogs at http://fairmilewest.com, on LinkedIn and can be found on Twitter at @iannock.