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At Mile High Video, I interviewed multiple industry executives. Where appropriate, I asked for their perspectives and experiences with VVC. Here are their responses, which have been edited lightly for readability.
You can watch the video on YouTube here, or embedded below.
Contents
Mickaël Raulet, Ateme
Q: So what are you seeing with VVC? I know you have a VVC encoder. Is it live as well? What’s the uptake on that?
A: In Brazil, for us it’s a big uptake for what we call “TV 2,” which has a new name now: TV 3.0. That’s where we’re seeing adoption today. The other one is in China, but in China they’re mostly using their own codec (AVS2). VVC is starting to get some penetration in China, and they are also pushing a lot to use VVC in China. For us, it’s mainly Brazil that we’re concentrating on for VVC.
Q: Is your solution codec-agnostic, or is it tied to one codec?
A: Everyone could work with it later on, so yeah, it is fully codec-agnostic.
Q: Looking at your customers’ streams, how would you break that down between codecs? What percentage is still H.264/AVC versus HEVC, AV1, VVC? Can you estimate at this point?
A: It’s hard to estimate exact numbers, but we see people moving from H.264 to HEVC a lot. We’re also seeing interest in AV1 this year. In the US, many are starting to use HEVC (often only in trials). There was a big takeoff in 2018; after that, we were waiting for hardware to catch up for live. And two years ago, there was a big demand for VVC as well. Now I’m also seeing a big demand for AV1, because the ecosystem is there and streaming providers are looking into putting AV1 in production, even for live.
1:53 – Chris Phillips, Adeia
Q: One of the big questions in streaming relates to VVC: when will it be a technology people start to use? When will people adopt it? Do you have any insights on that?
A: Well, one of the optimizations we’ve seen here at the conference — we weren’t specifically using VVC, but the optimizations can be made leveraging VVC. What we’re showing relates to changing resolution without having to produce an entirely new picture. In these extreme low-latency cases, as well as the bandwidth savings, I think that’s going to happen very fast. One of the big delays with VVC was that once the specification was finalized, it took time for an implementation to come out and reach the market in a usable form. We’re getting to that point now. In a demonstration from Ericsson here, they showed an implementation of a VVC codec running cloud gaming with low latency. So I think VVC is at the point now where it’s beginning to be deployed.
3:08 – Jan De Cock, Synamedia
Q: I’m asking everyone about their views on VVC. What are you hearing from people you’re talking to here, and in general, about implementing VVC?
A: VVC… that’s a good question. We have developed our own encoders going back to MPEG-2, AVC, HEVC — we have our own VVC implementation. We are seeing interest in VVC, but it’s still early exploration. And I think it’s also quite geographically dependent. Some parts of the world might evaluate and adopt it faster, while in other regions it’s more just initial interest. In some places the interest is a bit more concrete: there is testing going on, exploration of decoder devices and how those would enter the market.
Q: I heard from another interviewee that China was not adopting anything from the Alliance for Open Media (like AV1) because they prefer open standards. Is that what you’re saying about China and VVC adoption?
A: China is indeed a market where things might go faster than in other parts of the world. There’s also the next-generation broadcast initiative in Brazil (TV 3.0) where VVC is in the toolbox. So there are a couple of places where I think the interest in VVC is more concrete at this point.
4:47 – Andrew Frost, MulticoreWare
Q: Looking strictly at codecs, what are you seeing? I notice MulticoreWare works on everything from x265 (HEVC) to VVC. What interest are you seeing across those codecs?
A: One trend I’ve observed since last year’s Mile High Video conference is that people aren’t quite ready to move past HEVC yet. In the words of a wise friend: “We have enough headaches with HEVC, so we’re not ready to move past it.” We need to fix that first before we can really move on. I’ve seen that through our customer base and the conversations I’ve had throughout the year. VVC adoption and other alternative formats are starting to grow, but device support and the business case for transitioning your entire codec lineup beyond HEVC are still developing slowly, at least in my view.
Q: How bullish are you on VVC?
A: I’m very bullish on VVC. We are a patent holder and promoter of VVC as well. We are very, very bullish on VVC as an excellent technology. It has a lot of benefits that companies are starting to figure out.
5:49 – Guido Meardi, V-Nova
Q: From your perspective at V-Nova (which works on MPEG-5 LCEVC), what’s your take on VVC?
A: The combination of LCEVC with VVC is particularly helpful in Brazil — it proved to be critical in their broadcast trials (the SBTVD “TV 3.0” initiative) and even in ATSC. Aside from broadcast, we are working with big partners to show the benefits in mobile deployment. Essentially, even when hardware decoding isn’t available, the combination of LCEVC and VVC makes it possible to decode with sustainable battery consumption using software decoding. LCEVC also makes VVC encoding up to three times faster. So aside from compression benefits, the most important thing is faster encoding and much lower battery usage at decode. This makes it feasible to deploy VVC at scale today on a very high percentage of mobile devices. (We’ve shown similar things with AV1 as well.) We see VVC as an excellent codec for the applications we’re working on. In broadcasting, everything we are doing now is with VVC. And in mobile, we are working on some exciting applications, especially in Asia.
7:29 – Jean-Baptiste Kempf, VLC
Q: A subject near and dear to both of us is VVC. We spoke about a year ago, and you said “VVC was dead.” I was surprised the latest version of FFmpeg had a VVC decoder in it. So, all jokes aside, what are you seeing from the industry regarding VVC adoption in the companies you work with now?
A: It’s the same, really. Unfortunately, I think the VVC use cases are too small and not interesting enough to become a massive thing. And the patent situation is even worse than the last one (HEVC), so for me it’s not compelling enough for mass adoption. But at the same time – as you know – I’m actually the one who sponsored the VVC decoder in FFmpeg, because the goal of FFmpeg (and VLC) is to support everything. That doesn’t mean I believe the codec is good or not; that’s not my problem. As a technical person, as head of VLC and an active member of MPEG, we support everything new. We need to support it. We support things like VP6, VP7, VP8, even VP9. (Those codecs are far less useful!) But I still think we’ll see a dual track of H.264 and AV1 in many cases. I feel that VP8 and VP9 will slowly give way to AV1, and that HEVC will stick around for broadcasting. Outside of broadcast, it’s just going to be H.264 and AV1. I’m not very optimistic about mass adoption of VVC or other newer codecs.
Q: Is VVC playback available in VLC?
A: Yes, of course.
Q: Okay, I didn’t know that. That’s something I’ll have to try out.
9:26 – Sharon Carmel, Beamr
Q: What’s your view on VVC at this point? Where is it going, and when will it be here?
A: Well, being in this space for many years, I can tell you that Beamr has no plans to implement VVC or create our own VVC encoder, just like we didn’t for AV1. These things take time, and there’s a lot of adoption that needs to happen. A standard is a serious thing. Many parties need to play along. There are silicon ramifications of adding an additional decoder on the player side, so it’s a big deal. What we’re seeing — just as a rule of thumb — is about ten years. It takes around ten years from the introduction of a new codec until it gets some initial market traction. Then there’s always the mass adoption phase where content distributors say “we’re going to adopt it” because they see enough availability of decoders. So yes, we’ll adopt yet another standard, but it’s always a transitional process. It takes time. So, don’t hold your breath. And it’s not because I have anything against it — it’s just a process that takes a long time.
11:01 – Thierry Fautier, Your Media Transformation
Q: In 60 seconds or less, what are your predictions about VVC?
A: VVC: great technology, poor adoption — and I cannot fix that. I’m not going to get into the patent discussion, but it’s a typical example. You saw my post recently on LinkedIn saying that for mobile devices it was AVC and HEVC for encoders. VVC… nobody’s touching it because it’s too complicated. The good news is that a VVC decoder on mobile does work: Alibaba presented a very decent implementation up to 4K. But if I want to encode, can I do it? No. (And I know your next question is going to be about the next codec. If we can’t sell VVC, how are we going to sell the next generation?) It’s remarkable to me that they’re even pursuing it, but I don’t want to go there.
Q: So you don’t see VVC having an impact? Is it never going to succeed?
A: You cannot say “never” — and don’t quote me on that — but I’d say VVC had high expectations and not too much results so far.
Q: So far, or ever?
A: Not so far. I think Brazil will launch it. Japan will make an 8K channel with it, but it’s not impactful. What I’d like to hear is the Chinese community saying, “We cannot use American technology, so let’s lean on VVC.” VVC would then be a huge success in China and maybe beyond China… maybe.
12:31 – Will Law, Akamai
Q: How much interest are you seeing in VVC?
A: To be honest, not much, especially on the CDN side. Everyone’s practical. H.264 is still the dominant codec we deliver. There’s some uptake in HEVC, especially for 4K content now, but VVC is very, very little. More AV1 would be the third one in the mix. As a CDN, we’re codec-agnostic; we see MP4 containers, but we don’t know what’s inside. A lot of people ask for stats — surely we know who’s playing what. We don’t. We would have to dig into customer data and parse their objects to figure out the codecs they’re using. It’s a privacy issue and computationally too expensive to perform that kind of analysis.
