The Hidden Toll: Why Tech Giants Are Abandoning HEVC

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is currently grappling with a fragmented licensing ecosystem that has made implementation increasingly difficult for hardware and software vendors. Unlike previous standards, HEVC is governed by multiple competing patent pools, including Access Advance and Via Licensing Alliance, which create a patent thicket of overlapping royalty demands. This complexity and the associated financial burden have led many tech companies to pivot toward royalty-free alternatives like AV1. The industry is seeing a trend where vendors remove or limit HEVC support to avoid legal risks and high costs, illustrating a major conflict between technical superiority and commercial viability in media standards.