HEVC Advance announces 'Royalty Free' HEVC software

Major initiative designed to rapidly accelerate widespread HEVC (H.265)/UHD adoption on mobile devices and personal computers

BOSTON — HEVC Advance, an independent licensing administrator, today announced a major software policy initiative to rapidly accelerate widespread HEVC/UHD adoption in consumer mobile devices and personal computers. Under the software initiative, HEVC Advance will not seek a license or royalties on HEVC functionality implemented in application layer software downloaded to mobile devices or personal computers after the initial sale of the device, where the HEVC encoding or decoding is fully executed in software on a general purpose CPU. Examples of the types of software within the policy include browsers, media players and various software applications.

According to Peter Moller, CEO of HEVC Advance, “We are very pleased to offer this initiative. A critical goal of HEVC Advance is to encourage widespread adoption of HEVC/UHD technology in consumer devices. While HEVC technology implemented in specialized hardware circuitry provides the best and most efficient user experience, there are millions of existing mobile devices and personal computers that do not have HEVC hardware capability. Our initiative is tailored to enable software app and browser providers to include HEVC capability in their software products so that everyone can enjoy HEVC/UHD video today. I’d like to specifically thank Tom Vaughan at MulticoreWare for his guidance in our development of this initiative.”

Tom Vaughan, VP and GM of Video at MulticoreWare remarked: “We have invested heavily in the development of our HEVC codecs and associated libraries. From the start, HEVC Advance worked very hard to listen, understand and develop solutions to respond to the market’s concerns about HEVC Adoption. We are thankful for their efforts and believe this initiative will encourage and facilitate software developers, web service and content providers, mobile device manufacturers and others to take advantage of the tremendous competitive advantage that HEVC provides as quickly as possible.”

Subject to certain exceptions/conditions. Full details on the software policy initiative are available on the HEVC Advance website.