The future of video codecs is as uncertain as ever with little consensus emerging among vendors or service providers over which ones will prevail, at least on the distribution side. The situation has not been helped by MPEG’s own decision to proceed with a successor to HEVC even while that codec is still beset by wrangling over licensing and intellectual property. This is tantamount to an admission that HEVC’s performance improvement over its H.264 predecessor has been underwhelming in the face of unprecedented demand for encoding efficiency driven by the advent of ultra HD and proliferation of OTT services. This proposed HEVC successor called JEM (Joint Exploration Mode) arose from an evaluation team set up jointly by MPEG and the…