High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the latest compression standard designed to enhance the efficiency of all video streams. It is a joint ITU/ISO standard that finds applications in various video transmission fields, including satellite, cable, wireless, and multi-screen (OTT), as well as linear and non-linear content.
The primary benefit of HEVC is bandwidth efficiency, aiming to reduce bandwidth by 50% while achieving video quality benchmarks comparable to today's MPEG-4 AVC. In applications where bandwidth reduction is not the highest priority, HEVC can be used to significantly improve video quality at the same bit rate as AVC, making it advantageous for delivering 4K Ultra HD content. In both cases, HEVC meaningfully reduces costs, providing video with all other methods and achieving a rapid return on investment.
Ultimately, the efficiency of HEVC means it will be utilized throughout the video delivery infrastructure, but this will not happen overnight. Initial deployments will focus on bandwidth applications for OTT/multi-screen, often constrained by infrastructure that is more flexible. Linear television will begin deploying IPTV/OTT video-on-demand applications, followed by HEVC broadcasting of live Ultra HD content in 2014.
Harmonic is leading the way in the initial deployment of HEVC with PROMEDIA, our market-leading multi-screen software solution that supports the codec. As announced at NAB 2013, PROMEDIA's file-based transcoder supports HEVC and AVC transcoding for Ultra HD video-on-demand content. The PROMEDIA live real-time transcoder enables HEVC and AVC compressed Ultra HD material to be available for real-time delivery.
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