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The acquisition of Via Licensing Alliance’s HEVC and VVC programs by Access Advance is being framed as a cleanup of codec licensing. Instead of dealing with two pool administrators, licensees now deal with one, reducing administrative friction and simplifying negotiations. That’s a real improvement, particularly for device manufacturers, and it may reduce effective royalties at the margin.
What it doesn’t do is change the underlying adoption dynamics for HEVC or VVC, especially on the publisher side. That distinction matters because the publisher side is where adoption has stalled for anything that isn’t tied to a must-have market.
Contents
The Jan Ozer Rule of Codec Adoption
The Jan Ozer Rule of Codec Adoption is simple: markets adopt new codecs when they’re essential to a critical new market. Not when they’re incrementally more efficient or easier to license. When they’re required.
AVC didn’t replace MPEG-2 because it was more efficient. It replaced it because HD delivery at scale wasn’t practical with MPEG-2, given the bandwidth constraints of the time. In addition, while the roughly $2–$2.50-per-unit MPEG-2 decoder royalty didn’t prevent that transition, it did make H.264’s $0.20-per-unit pricing look reasonable by comparison. Because HD was a real, monetizable market, publisher demand and device support aligned quickly, and H.264 became essential for any serious market participant.
As I’ve covered ad nauseam, most commentators blame HEVC’s dismal licensing optics for its lack of publisher adoption. But every publisher who was producing 4K/HDR deployed HEVC. Conversely, very, very few publishers beyond YouTube, Meta, and Netflix ever deployed the supposedly royalty-free VP9, which offered similar bandwidth savings to HEVC, or AV1, which provided even more.
The lesson? For the vast majority of publishers, pure efficiency doesn’t drive codec adoption.
Why Publishers Don’t Deploy Codecs for Pure Efficiency
Why don’t publishers adopt codecs for pure bandwidth savings? Multiple reasons. First, as device markets get more fragmented, bandwidth savings are achieved with fewer devices. So, same integration and implementation burden, more storage and cache costs, but lower bandwidth savings.
Second, bandwidth prices have dropped precipitously and are almost noise at this point. I’m just finishing a consulting project where the client pays under $0.005/GB. Savings for advanced codecs per 100M views were in the $50K range in some cases. Worth chasing in the abstract, for sure. But not significantly impacting the bottom line.
And, as I’ll cover in more detail below, these savings must be balanced against the increased risk of content royalties, both from patent pools and individual patent owners like Nokia, who received $2 billion from Apple in part for H.264 usage. Takes a lot of $50K chunks to make up $2 billion. While this Nokia/Apple suit was for device royalties, Nokia has recently signed agreements with several large streamers, including a deal with Amazon that covers both devices and content.
About The Long Term
What about the theory that VVC is somehow inevitable as the next broadcast standard? There’s a certain comfort with this argument; it makes logical sense and feels familiar. Wi-Fi 6 followed previous versions without a hitch, and the same is true with most technologies.
That said, we’ve never seen that inevitability argument work in video codecs. As mentioned, what drove HEVC was 4K/HDR, not simply because it was the next broadcast standard.
AV1 was finalized in 2018 and has nearly 100% adoption on computers, over 88% adoption in the living room, and significant penetration on mobile devices via hardware or software. All that said, beyond YouTube, Meta, and Netflix, publisher adoption is very limited.
In contrast, in 2025, five years after finalization, VVC has virtually 0% penetration in any of those segments (other than in Brazil). Which codec feels more inevitable to you?
Besides, what is broadcast anymore, and how important is it to technology adoption? Does the same inevitability argument apply to H.267? The one thing we do know is that the longer it takes for a technology to gain adoption, the more likely it is to be disrupted.
Why HEVC Was Already Decided
OK, back to Access Advance/Via LA. The consolidation doesn’t significantly impact HEVC device adoption, which is already a done deal. Devices adopted HEVC years ago, while premium streaming and broadcast standardized on HEVC because they had to. Cleaning up pool administration in 2025 doesn’t unlock a new HEVC market for devices, because there isn’t one left to unlock.
More importantly, the deal doesn’t address the factor that has limited broader HEVC usage for non-4K/HDR efficiency use cases, and that same factor looms even larger for VVC. Specifically, Access Advance/Via LA is all about encoding/decoding royalties. What’s retarding publisher adoption today are content royalties, a risk that Via LA’s pool doesn’t cover.
Why Known Royalties Aren’t the Real Problem
As you probably know, both Access Advance and Avanci have streaming content-oriented pools that charge royalties based on publishers’ use of VP9, AV1, HEVC, and VVC. Access’s royalty rates are capped at about $63 million/year; Avanci hasn’t published its rates.
However, the major friction preventing publisher adoption of HEVC and VVC isn’t this known royalty exposure. Those costs are visible, capped, and modelable. Companies have lived with known codec royalties for decades, even when they didn’t like them.
The real issue is the known-unknown royalty risk, particularly the risk of Nokia-style claims that sit outside pool structures. That cloud has always existed, but it no longer feels hypothetical. Publishers can’t mitigate the risk, which makes it hard to justify deploying a codec purely for incremental efficiency.
As discussed above, is it worth chasing savings in $50K chunks if you’re opening your company up to a potential ten-figure liability?
AV1 Risk Perception
For better or worse, and notwithstanding the Avanci and Access Advance content pools, there’s a belief in the market that AV1 is more insulated against this class of attack. Maybe it’s wishful thinking. Maybe all the work AOMedia did to isolate IP exposure actually worked. Maybe it’s the patent defense program. The industry doesn’t really know AV1’s infringement status, but many publishers behave as if AV1 is safer, and behavior is what matters.
Paradoxically, the best thing HEVC and VVC patent owners could do to advance adoption would be to sue on their AV1 patents and win. A clear, public victory would close the perceived safety gap and force publishers to reevaluate codecs on technical and economic grounds.
Of course, that’s a scary move. It would be an expensive suit against bottomless pockets. It would target companies you still have to coexist with in the market. And it would carry the risk of losing and reinforcing the opposite narrative.
But until this happens, most publishers will continue to believe that AV1 is safer, avoid HEVC for efficiency-only use cases, and approach VVC with even more caution. Not because VVC doesn’t work, and not because pool licensing is too expensive, but because VVC doesn’t unlock a new market that justifies what’s perceived as asymmetric legal risk.
VVC and the Chicken-and-Egg Problem
That’s where the chicken-and-egg problem comes in, and it’s particularly acute for VVC. Why should a device manufacturer pay royalties and allocate silicon for a codec that no publisher is deploying or even asking for? Why should a publisher invest in encoding, packaging, testing, and playback support for a codec that has no installed player base? Historically, that stalemate only breaks when a new market opportunity forces the decision.
The Access Advance/VIA LA consolidation helps with process and efficiency. It also improves the optics, as one pool is certainly better than two. It’s a solid move and undoubtedly a net positive for HEVC and VVC.
However, it doesn’t make VVC necessary, and that’s the most critical factor in motivating short- or even mid-term codec adoption. It also doesn’t address concerns about Nokia-style licensing claims, which is the most crucial consideration for publisher adoption.
“very few publishers beyond YouTube, Meta, and Netflix”
These are the major video platforms on the internet. They are the top three in global internet traffic. They are the leaders in streaming.
These are internet companies. No internet company is going to tolerate royalty bearing formats in the long run. The internet is built on royalty free formats and protocols. Royalty free formats and protocols are the driver of the success of these companies.
Video has taken far too long to correct but it’s getting there.
Think of it this way: how’s Flash doing these days?
“the best thing HEVC and VVC patent owners could do to advance adoption would be to sue on their AV1 patents and win”
They won’t sue because they will lose. Their parasitic business model works better with ambiguity. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt is the name of the game.
They last thing they want is clarity.