In what was only very recently a merciless battleground of controversy and royalties spats, the video codec patent scene has been suspiciously quiet of late.
This year could see the return of codec disruption though, as patent pool licensor administrator HEVC Advance was awoken from its slumber by the arrival of Huawei as a member company, a week after South Korean electronics firm LG also signed up. Two nods of support in as many weeks from Asia-Pacific is an encouraging sign for HEVC patent holders as AV1 adoption fever has taken hold in recent years.
Huawei has become a licensor and licensee of the HEVC (H.265) patent pool, meaning all Huawei’s essential HEVC patents will become available to member companies, while in return gaining access to the existing 10,000+ global patents relating to the implementation of the video codec standard.
Huawei’s arrival at HEVC Advance comes almost a year after the Chinese company adopted the AVC (H.264) portfolio after a relatively shortlived dispute with rival patent pool MPEG LA.
So, what essential patents does Huawei bring to the party? In July 2018, website IP Watchdog carried out an analysis of relevant HEVC patent families, comprising 6,500 patents in total at the time, finding that Huawei had a 5% share of HEVC patent ownership distribution. Shared between 34 other companies, Samsung had the largest share at 11%, followed by Qualcomm 8%, LG 6%, and SK Telecom and Mediatek also both on 5%.
Huawei is one of the original developers of HEVC, first finalized in 2013, along with technology giants Microsoft, SK Telecon, Samsung, Qualcomm, LG, Mediatek and a few others. Yet AVC remains the most widely adopted of the video codecs globally. AVC has emerged as the winner simply because it was supported by just about every operating system, browser, player and encoding device, and also due to Apple shunning Google’s royalty free VP8 codec which kept it out of its extensive ecosystem.
Samsung is also a member of AV1 backing group the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), which recently welcomed Chinese internet behemoth Tencent as a member at the board level.
Huawei and LG have historically shied away from joining a specific patent pool, as the arrival of conflicting groups of patent owners has limited the scope of HEVC licences, while the likes of Samsung and Mediatek have only lifted the skirt on their portfolios – providing a small portion to patent pools.
That isn’t the case here, however, as HEVC Advance has announced that both Huawei and LG are providing ALL essential HEVC patents to the pool.
It’s worth noting that Technicolor rejoined HEVC Advance in October 2019, as a licensee but not a licensor, after dropping out of the patent pool in late 2016. Technicolor has been frustrated by the confusion around royalties, which is hardly surprising considering the video pioneer owns some 30,000 patents and patent applications, in the areas of video coding and image processing, telecommunications, user experience, security and displays.
Taking in the bigger picture, the MPEG/ITU camp has cause for concern, but this is not for technical reasons, but because of the deterioration in the licensing situation that coincided with the roll out of HEVC. This has always been a bugbear for the MPEG range, but was at least contained during the MPEG-2 and then H.264 eras, while HEVC patents have fragmented into three pools, with another called Velos Media pitted against HEVC Advance and MPEG LA, presenting a confusing and risky picture for potential users. This has given oxygen to the AV1 movement far more than arguable and sometimes spurious claims of performance gains over HEVC.
Velos Media boasts the likes of Qualcomm, Panasonic, Sony and Ericsson as members, boasting that Qualcomm has the highest number of overall contributions for the HEVC Main Profile, some 20 or so more than second-placed Samsung.
The MPEG-LA argued that the success of the royalty free AV1 codec would cripple the video market by making the powerful even more powerful, shifting control from device makers to internet behemoths. MPEG-LA has over 200 licensees, way ahead of any other royalty bearing group and prior to April 2017 it seemed that handset manufacturers didn’t want to license from HEVC Advance—until Samsung signed up.
HEVC Advance responded in 2018 by eliminating some royalties, specifically for subscription and title-by-title content distribution, to accelerate HEVC adoption.