AV1 vs HEVC Licensing: Key Differences Explained

The primary difference between AV1 and HEVC (H.265) lies in their licensing frameworks: AV1 is an open-source, royalty-free video codec developed to eliminate adoption costs, whereas HEVC is governed by a fragmented, royalty-bearing model managed by multiple competing patent pools. This article examines the structural, financial, and legal differences between HEVC's complex licensing ecosystem and AV1's unified, royalty-free alternative.

The HEVC Licensing Ecosystem

HEVC was standardized by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG). Unlike its predecessor, AVC (H.264), which offered a centralized licensing scheme through a single administrator, HEVC's intellectual property became fragmented across several separate patent pools and independent licensors:

• Multiple Patent Pools: Licensors are split primarily between Access Advance, MPEG LA (now part of Via Licensing Alliance), and Velos Media. Each pool establishes its own royalty rates, caps, and licensing terms.
• Non-Pool Patent Holders: Several significant patent holders, such as Technicolor and other individual technology companies, chose not to join any pool, requiring companies to negotiate separate, bilateral agreements.
• Content and Hardware Fees: HEVC licensing applies fees not just to hardware encoders and decoders, but historically attempted to levy royalties on streaming content distribution itself. While content distribution fees were largely scaled back due to industry pushback, device manufacturers still face cumulative per-unit costs that can be prohibitive at scale.
• Administrative Uncertainty: The lack of a single "one-stop shop" creates legal and financial uncertainty for businesses, as obtaining a license from one or two pools does not grant total immunity against infringement claims from other patent holders.

The AV1 Royalty-Free Model

AV1 was developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a non-profit consortium founded by major technology companies, including Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Intel, and Apple. Designed specifically as an alternative to HEVC, AV1's licensing model is built on openness and legal predictability:

• Royalty-Free Terms: AV1 is published under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, combined with an explicit AOMedia Patent License. Anyone can implement, distribute, and commercialize AV1 software or hardware without paying per-unit royalties or subscription fees.
• Cross-Licensing Commitments: Every member of AOMedia agrees to license their essential patents relevant to AV1 on a royalty-free basis. This ensures that the core intellectual property from leading chipmakers, browser vendors, and streaming platforms is permanently accessible without financial encumbrances.
• Defensive Termination: The AOMedia Patent License includes a defensive clause. If a company initiates patent infringement litigation against an AV1 adopter regarding AV1 technology, that company immediately forfeits its own royalty-free rights to AV1.
• Legal Defense Support: AOMedia established a defense fund to protect smaller developers and commercial adopters from third-party patent assertion entities (patent trolls) that challenge the codec's royalty-free status.

Summary of Differences

By removing the legal fragmentation and recurring royalties of HEVC, AV1 provides an accessible standard suited for web browsers, streaming platforms, and cross-platform software distribution.