How HEVC Licensing Uncertainty Accelerated AV1

The rapid development and commercial deployment of the AV1 video codec was largely catalyzed by the fragmented and unpredictable licensing landscape of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265). While HEVC offered the compression efficiency required for 4K and HDR content, its complex patent pools and uncapped royalty demands posed severe legal and financial risks for distributors and hardware makers. In response, major technology leaders united to form the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) to develop AV1—a royalty-free, open-source alternative—accelerating its adoption across web browsers, streaming platforms, and consumer hardware.

The HEVC Patent Pool Fragmentation

Prior to HEVC, the industry relied on AVC (H.264), which operated under a predictable, single patent pool managed by MPEG LA. Licensees enjoyed transparent fee structures and reasonable annual royalty caps, creating a stable environment for global adoption.

When HEVC launched, this licensing model fractured. Instead of a unified pool, multiple competing licensing administrators emerged:

• MPEG LA established one pool.
• HEVC Advance (now Access Advance) formed a rival pool with higher rates and attempted to levy fees on content streaming itself, rather than just on hardware decoders.
• Velos Media emerged later with additional claims from major patent holders.
• Independent Licensors, including companies like Technicolor, withheld their patents from all pools to seek separate bilateral agreements.

This division left streaming services, device manufacturers, and software developers facing stacked royalties, unpredictable costs, and the risk of continuous patent litigation. For modern web browsers and open-source platforms, distributing HEVC natively was financially impossible.

The Creation of the Alliance for Open Media

Faced with HEVC’s unsustainable licensing terms, tech giants recognized the need to decouple future video delivery from opaque patent pools. In 2015, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Mozilla, Intel, and Cisco founded the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia).

Rather than developing competing independent formats, the members merged their respective research initiatives:

• Google contributed its work on VP9 and VP10.
• Mozilla and Xiph.Org contributed the Daala project.
• Cisco contributed its Thor codec.

By combining intellectual property, technical expertise, and substantial legal resources, AOMedia designed AV1 to deliver compression performance superior to HEVC while maintaining a royalty-free license with an open-source reference implementation.

Strategic Shift from Standardization to Deployment

Standardizing a new video codec typically takes a decade before reaching mainstream consumer hardware. However, the commercial pressure caused by HEVC licensing drastically condensed the timeline for AV1.

Streaming platforms like YouTube and Netflix quickly rolled out AV1 streams to compatible devices to reduce bandwidth consumption without paying HEVC royalties. Because AOMedia included major web browser vendors (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and later Apple Safari), software-level decoding for AV1 reached billions of users long before dedicated hardware was ubiquitous.

Hardware Acceleration and Market Dominance

The threat of HEVC royalties also motivated silicon manufacturers to prioritize AV1 silicon support. Hardware decoders were rapidly integrated into consumer chipsets from Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, MediaTek, Samsung, and Qualcomm, with Apple eventually adding AV1 hardware support to its Apple Silicon lineup.

HEVC’s licensing uncertainty ultimately backfired on its patent holders. Instead of securing substantial royalties from the streaming boom, the licensing friction drove the industry to mobilize collective legal and engineering resources, permanently shifting the future of internet video toward open, royalty-free standards.