A Conversation with MC-IF Member Robert Moore, President, OP Solutions
Video coding is reaching an inflection point as global politics, semiconductor roadmaps, and shifting market dynamics converge to shape the future of next-generation media delivery. Amid surging video consumption, rising network costs, the emergence of immersive formats, and intensifying geopolitical concerns, Versatile Video Coding (VVC) has begun to emerge as the most likely successor to today’s dominant standards.
In this vidcast interview for journalists, Robert Moore, President of OP Solutions and a member of the Media Coding Industry Forum (MC-IF), explains why VVC’s growth appears inevitable, how codec adoption historically unfolds, and what technological and geopolitical forces are accelerating the shift toward this new global standard.
Here is what he had to say:
Q: For context, what is OP Solutions, and how does it relate to MC-IF?
Moore: OP Solutions was founded in 2018 as a partnership with Florida Atlantic University, which has a very strong video compression development team. Since the beginning, we’ve participated in MPEG standardization efforts, including VVC. Over the last five years, our work has focused on machine-to-machine video, such as the upcoming MPEG codec Feature Coding for Machines, where we’ve developed the world’s first real-time implementation.
Q: Given the dominance of legacy codecs, what does your outlook for VVC adoption look like?
Moore: The first question we should ask is: What does success look like for a codec? A codec might exist in software but not in hardware, or vice versa. It might be supported by content providers but not by device manufacturers. Adoption across the entire ecosystem requires the entire chain—hardware, content, and services—to move together.
Historically, the hardware side makes the first move. Chipset suppliers create the installed base, and content providers follow once that installed base reaches critical mass. That pattern played out with HEVC. Finalized in 2013, HEVC was adopted by MediaTek and Qualcomm by 2015–2016. Apple soon followed. Together, those three companies represented 75–85% of the global phone market, enabling widespread HEVC use. Netflix and other services then adopted it as a premium option.
With VVC, we’re seeing the early stages of a similar trajectory. MediaTek—one of the world’s largest TV SoC manufacturers—has already implemented VVC in its flagship chips. Intel has announced VVC support for laptops. It’s reasonable to expect that other hardware manufacturers will follow.
The major remaining frontier is mobile. Qualcomm, MediaTek, Apple, and HiSilicon account for nearly the entire global mobile SoC ecosystem. When a major supplier commits to VVC, mobile adoption will accelerate rapidly. Qualcomm is a member of MC-IF and has publicly stated plans to support VVC for mobile, which strongly suggests momentum is building.
It’s also notable that we’re seeing considerable software implementations from content providers, especially in China – they aren’t waiting for VVC in silicon.
Q: What development or deployment challenges must manufacturers and service providers address to adopt VVC at scale?
Moore: The biggest challenge is inertia. Once a codec is in a chipset, it stays there. Allocating silicon to one codec means not allocating it to something else. It’s a meaningful engineering commitment.
Costs also matter—both silicon costs and, to a lesser extent, patent licensing. But ultimately, timing drives adoption. When Qualcomm adopts VVC for mobile, it is highly probable that MediaTek will follow. At that point, the majority of Android devices would support VVC, and the ecosystem will begin shifting.
Broadcast standards are also influential. Brazil’s next-generation broadcast standard requires VVC. DVB, adopted widely across Europe and beyond, includes VVC as part of its specification. China has shown strong interest as well. These top-down decisions help accelerate industry alignment.
Q: Is there coordination across the ecosystem to harmonize VVC adoption?
Moore: Coordination does happen, especially when major platforms push a codec through their ecosystem. AV1 is an example. The Alliance for Open Media, led by Google, drove AV1 adoption across Android TV, Roku devices using Android TV OS, and eventually Android phones.
For VVC, we’re seeing significant participation from companies across the world, including China. In 2020, I co-authored an analysis ranking the companies whose technical contributions were accepted into the VVC standard. Of the top five contributors—MediaTek, Qualcomm, Huawei, ByteDance, and Sharp—most are from Asia.
This reflects a larger trend. Chinese firms have been motivated to diversify away from dependence on Western technology platforms. The 2018 Huawei-TSMC incident, in which the threat of US sanctions against companies in Huawei’s supply chain led to Huawei essentially running out of chips for a while, underscored that vulnerability. As a result, China has put substantial effort into building alternatives across a broad range of technology areas—including video coding.
Because VVC is a genuinely global standard with major contributions from China, the U.S., Korea, Japan, Europe and others, it may present fewer geopolitical risks for Chinese manufacturers than adopting Western-led proprietary alternatives such as AV1 or AV2.
Q: How should companies balance these considerations to move forward efficiently?
Moore: First, they should determine whether adoption is driven by platform requirements or regulatory mandates—those decisions make the path simple.
Second, companies must acknowledge that codecs supplement rather than replace one another. Removing an old codec is rarely an option because legacy content must be supported.
Despite HEVC’s momentum, roughly 70% of streamed video worldwide still uses AVC (H.264), a standard more than 20 years old. Content providers haven’t fully updated their encoding ladders for newer codecs because AVC works well enough, given the low cost to content providers of bandwidth.
But with more and more screens watching more and more video, bandwidth costs will inevitably rise. At some point, the math will turn, and content providers will have to update their ladders—and the transition accelerates.
Q: The “V” in VVC stands for versatility. Are new use cases—such as immersive or 360° video—driving adoption?
Moore: Absolutely. During VVC standardization, one of the early “core experiments” focused on 360-degree video and VR. Even though immersive media hasn’t gone mainstream yet, the standard was built with these future applications in mind.
If VR or AR takes off—whether tomorrow or five years from now—VVC is the codec best positioned to support those markets efficiently.
Q: Are there semiconductor or AI-driven advances that could accelerate adoption?
Moore: Yes. I’ve heard that advancements in AI have reduced the cost of taping out a codec—essentially lowering the engineering cost of implementing a codec in silicon. That could make VVC adoption easier. But ongoing costs still exist, and engineering resources are finite. So while this helps, it’s not the sole factor.
Q: Looking ahead, what economic or technical factors should affect VVC deployment and use over the next several years?
Moore: Every decision-maker should consider the costs and benefits of any codec deployment holistically. For device implementers, that really redounds to, what are the engineering and opportunity costs of adding the feature in silicon versus the benefit of customer demand. For content providers, the question is the cost of adding another codec to the mix – meaning additional encoding ladders and cloud storage for copies of media encoded with VVC – versus customer demand and potential cost savings from more efficient storage. There could be some other factors influencing the decision, such as tacit or overt government mandates in effect creating customer demand or environmental objectives leading firms to prioritize more efficient cloud storage, meaning more efficient video compression. But compared to all these costs and benefits, the patent cost—often cited as a major influence on adoption—is insignificant and shouldn’t be a material part of a rational decision-making process on codec deployment.
All of the above in mind, there are good reasons to be optimistic about VVC adoption going forward. First, as mentioned, at least in TVs and laptops, the installed base for VVC has reached or probably soon will reach critical mass, meaning the installed base should be large enough to factor into content providers’ plans, which will lead to further adoption. VVC hardware implementations beget VVC content beget more VVC hardware implementations, and so on. Second, there seems to be tacit and overt national support for VVC that should drive adoption. Brazil adopted VVC as part of its broadcast standard. TVs sold there use chipsets developed for TVs worldwide. Those chipsets will need to implement VVC to work in Brazil, and it’s unlikely these worldwide chipset suppliers will develop SoCs for Brazilian use only. This means that VVC will find its way into the mix for additional chipset suppliers, and those additional chipsets will probably find their way into TVs in other countries.
Chinese support also seems to be ramping up. For instance, Rethink Technology Research reported that new Huawei Mate phones had VVC implemented in their HiSilicon chipsets. There are also reports of Chinese social media companies using software implementations of VVC in their apps and using VVC internally for storage. All of this is in keeping with my observation earlier that Chinese firms are motivated to diversify their technology supply chains away from sources more closely aligned with the West and Western companies, in this case, like AV1. These companies’ use of VVC for internal storage also demonstrates the value of the codec’s improved compression.
Q: What role do you think patent royalties will play in helping or hindering VVC adoption?
I think patent royalties are a red herring here. The potential patent cost of VVC (or, frankly, any other codec) pales in comparison to other potential costs whether that’s implementation costs for device OEMs, the costs of adding and maintaining additional encoding ladders and copies of encoded media in the cloud for content providers. Also outweighing potential patent costs are the potential benefits which could include consumer demand, compliance with de facto or de jure governmental mandate, improved internal storage, etc. In a rational decision-making process, those considerations, and not concern about patent royalties, would determine whether, when, and by whom VVC is supported.
I’ll go a step further and say that, even if you disregard the fact that the non-patent costs and benefits of VVC dwarf the patent costs, VVC’s patent costs are not a compelling reason to delay implementation. The data is clear–VVC’s patent cost is lower than what implementers have broadly accepted for prior codecs, taking into account things like inflation and the average sales price of compliant devices.
To illustrate, let’s go over the history of video codec pool licensing, which began in the 1990s and which historically had industry support from both the licensor and licensor communities.
MPEG-LA’s MPEG-2 pool—the first—launched in 1997, seeking $4.00 per unit for most devices (nearly $8.00 in 2024 dollars). An archive.org snapshot of Amazon.com from December 1998 lists a Philips 22-Inch 720p LED LCD HDTV – a representative model of the most common screen size that year for sale in the market with the highest unit sales of compliant devices – for sale for $179. For that device, pool royalties accounted for over 2% of the sales price. Content producers owed a modicum of royalties as well – $0.04 per DVD (nearly $0.08 today), for instance. MPEG-LA revised these rates downwards at various times, but this pool was a major success, eventually attracting most licensors and most implementers.
MPEG-LA’s AVC pool followed a few years later, accompanied by a price decrease for the MPEG-2 pool, maintaining a combined royalty stack that would attract most licensees. MPEG-LA set its AVC royalties purposefully low, $0.20 per unit, or about $0.35 today when correcting for inflation, and lowered its per-unit MPEG-2 royalties to $2.50 (over $4.30 in 2024 dollars). Combined, the royalties for MPEG-LA’s two pools were $2.70 per unit for most devices, or nearly $4.70 in 2024 dollars. Like the MPEG-2 pool, the AVC pool was a major success, and most implementers wound up licensing both. MPEG-LA pool royalties for the two codecs were 0.7% of the average sales price of televisions sold in the U.S. in 2004 ($400) and 0.6% of the sales price of the BlackBerry Curve 8330 ($449), one of the early U.S. phones to implement AVC, when it launched in December 2007.
In 2013, MPEG finalized the HEVC codec. MPEG-LA, as one would expect, started a pool, on essentially the same licensing terms as its highly successful AVC pool – $0.20 per device, or $0.27 per device in 2024 dollars. A contingent of major SEP owners disagreed with this licensing strategy. In their minds, the pool pricing for AVC was kept low because the price for MPEG-2 was so high. With MPEG-2 SEPs expiring or already expired, the group believed the overall royalty burden for video codecs shouldn’t drop from several dollars per unit to $0.20 per unit. These patent holders also took the position that content providers were capturing more of the value of the feature and therefore should contribute at least some royalties. This thinking was behind the launch of HEVC Advance (now Access Advance) in 2015, which offered an HEVC pool license at a higher price point than MPEG-LA, including initially seeking up to around $2.5M a year from content providers.
The market for HEVC patent licensing eventually shook out. Since 2016, HEVC Advance royalties for a phone sold in the US is $0.40 per unit (almost $0.55 in today’s dollars). MPEG-LA (now Via LA) continues to offer its HEVC pool license on the same terms as launch. These are successful pools, especially Access Advance’s HEVC program. In a July press release, Access said that their pool “represents an estimated 75-80% of the global HEVC landscape[,]” and judging by public announcements about licensees, I’d estimate that they have licensed at least 70% of the addressable market. In other words, the market has generally accepted Access Advance’s price point as commercially reasonable.
In many ways, patent licensing for VVC builds off this commercially reasonable royalty scheme for HEVC. As with HEVC, Access Advance and Via LA maintain separate VVC programs. The pools each structured their licensing structures to minimize incremental cost for companies already licensing HEVC. For a licensed phone sold in the US, an HEVC license from Access Advance is 40 cents, and phones with both HEVC and VVC pay a royalty of 50 cents if the manufacturer has taken both the HEVC Advance and VVC Advance licenses. Via LA charges 20 cents for HEVC, with VVC included at no extra cost. In other words, given Access Advance’s success with HEVC and the significant likelihood that phones that implement VVC will also implement HEVC, most implementers will be able to add a VVC license for just another dime per phone.
Especially factoring in overlapping licensors and enterprise caps, these prices are historically low—both in inflation-adjusted terms and relative to today’s far higher smartphone price points. A licensee to the Access Advance and Via LA HEVC pools will not have to pay twice for patents that are in both pools, such as Samsung’s (the leading contributor to HEVC), and will receive a setoff for those duplicate SEPs from one of the pools. But even without a setoff, the patent cost for HEVC and VVC is in line with the inflation-adjusted price the industry agreed upon with the MPEG-LA AVC pool. The total cost for most licensees for both HEVC and VVC for a phone sold in the US will be $0.70 – $0.50 for Access Advance’s HEVC and VVC licenses and $0.20 for Via LA’s licenses to both. That’s about $0.35 cents per codec, equal to the inflation-adjusted rate for MPEG-LA’s AVC pool, which, again, was set at an intentionally-low level.
Pool licensing costs relative to average sales price of covered units tell the same story. I mentioned the BlackBerry Curve 8330, an early smartphone to implement AVC that launched in late 2007 for $447. An AVC pool license represented about 0.045% of the sales price. The average sales price (ASP) for a smartphone sold in the US in 2024 was about $825 according to Statista. A price point of $0.35 per codec is about 0.042% of that ASP, slightly less than the AVC’s pool cost as a percentage of ASP.
It is true that some major VVC licensors are not in pools, and bilateral licensing with these companies could raise the total patent cost of the standard. This is also true, however, of every other codec, and it has never impeded adoption. For instance, Nokia, a major contributor to AVC, HEVC, and VVC, has a licensing program for its video codec patents and has sued a number of implementers in recent years. Nokia’s efforts to license its AVC and HEVC patents outside a pool have not inhibited adoption of either codec.
In short: in my view, patent royalties are not a credible barrier to adoption for MPEG video codecs.
[12/16 NOTE: We conducted this Q&A in November 2025. We asked Rob to weigh in on relevant developments since then.]
Q: On December 15, 2026, Access Advance announced that it was acquiring Via-LA’s HEVC and VVC pools, with an intent to merge them by the end of 2026. What does this portend for VVC?
This further supports my thoughts above, in two respects.
First, historically, with each generation of video codec we have seen the launch of multiple pools, each with different approaches and price points. And the pools consolidate over time. We saw this with MPEG-LA prevailing over the Via AVC pool in 2007 and Avanci’s Velos Media HEVC pool winding down in 2022. This is natural. Each generation of codec needs to go through price discovery to determine what price points suit the market for licensors and licensees, and this process helps maintain alignment with the overall pool ethos of removing friction and uncertainty of patent licensing for all parties.
Second, the CEO of Access Advance has stated that the transaction is not expected to result in any changes to royalty rates in either program, with rates already set for the 2026-2030 period. And in the case of VVC, rates were not increased as compared to the 2020-2025 timeframe. He has further stated that he expects licensees will see reduced royalties as the pools combine and only one royalty payment is required. This announcement combined with Access Advance’s already launched Multi-Codec Bridging Agreement that provides significant discounts for licensees’ devices that include both HEVC and VVC, and the modest increase in royalties for VVC only devices as compared to HEVC only devices, proves my points on patent cost for codecs decreasing over time and VVC’s royalties being historically low.
Q: As one front in the ongoing patent licensing dispute between Oppo and ASUS, Oppo has asserted at least one patent it identifies as essential to VVC. Considering that VVC skeptics often point to patent risk as an impediment to adoption, how does this development affect your views?
Perhaps counterintuitively, I view this as a good thing for VVC. It shows that VVC adoption is actually happening. Patent enforcement is expensive, risky to a portfolio, and often demanding of team members, including named inventors. A patent holder typically won’t assert a patent unless the balance of equities favors the investment of resources. That is, Oppo apparently believes that the leverage it gets over ASUS from the assertion outweighs the considerations above. It follows, then, that Oppo—a sophisticated actor with deep insight into relevant markets and product roadmaps—believes that ASUS derives real value from VVC already and in the future. This runs counter to any narrative that VVC adoption continues to languish. Granted, if VVC implementers are afraid that adoption will lead to unbound litigation and patent cost, they will be less likely to implement the codec. To me, that’s of reduced concern here compared with other technologies that lack such a well-established pool licensing ecosystem for clearing patent risk.
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