H.266/VVC: The Latest Video Codec Standard Struggling with Patent Licensing
H.266/VVC (2020) achieves 50% better compression than HEVC but faces slow adoption due to patent licensing fragmentation and competition from royalty-free AV1.
H.266, formally known as Versatile Video Coding (VVC), was standardized in 2020 by a joint ITU/ISO group. It achieves roughly 50% bitrate reduction over H.265 (HEVC): The Technically Superior Codec Killed by Patent Licensing at equivalent visual quality — meaning 4K streaming at half the data rate. Adoption has been slow for reasons echoing HEVC's troubled history: a fragmented patent licensing landscape involving multiple competing royalty groups, extremely high encoder complexity (encoding is orders of magnitude slower than decoding), and fierce competition from the royalty-free AV1: The Royalty-Free Codec That Won the Web codec backed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia): The Consortium Behind AV1. Hardware decode support began appearing in 2024–2025 chipsets, but without a clear licensing framework that content distributors can budget against, the codec risks repeating HEVC's fate: technically superior but commercially hamstrung. **See also:** Video Codec History: H.261 to AV2 and the 2026 State of Streaming Compression