IEEE honors three key persons of HEVC video coding standardization

Benjamin Bross, Head of Video Coding Systems at Fraunhofer HHI, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jens-Rainer Ohm, Professor emeritus and former Head of the Institute of Communication Engineering at RWTH Aachen University and Dr. Gary J. Sullivan, Director of Video Research & Standards at Dolby Laboratories, have been announced as the recipients by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest technical professional organization and public charity dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. The award was given “for leadership in and contributions to developing the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) international standard.”

Leading the development of a groundbreaking video standard

The development of the HEVC standard brought together the world’s experts from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in a team known as the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC). Prof. Ohm and Dr. Sullivan chaired the development of the standard, and Benjamin Bross was the lead editor of its specification document. . Together they supervised and steered a process in which thousands of technical contribution documents from about a thousand technical experts in the international community were analyzed, and in which the features of the standard were selected and refined by consensus within the JCT-VC. Their leadership ensured the standard’s practicality for mass-market implementation and its complete and detailed technical specification.

The HEVC standard, also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a major advance over its predecessor, the well-established AVC standard developed ten years earlier. HEVC can provide approximately a 50% reduction in the bit rate needed to encode video at the same level of visual quality as AVC. After coordinated research conducted by experts from ITU-T and ISO/IEC groups, the JCT-VC was formed in 2010 and worked intensely on the design and specification of the HEVC standard, completing the first version in 2013. The standard was rapidly adopted by industry. It was a major factor in the successful deployment of several other major advances in video technology, including ultra-high definition (UHD) resolution, 10-bit video precision, high-dynamic range (HDR) with wide color gamut (WCG), high frame-rates, and streaming video services. By the end of 2015, most new personal computers and mobile handset devices and essentially all 4K UHD televisions were already including support for the ground-breaking HEVC standard.

HEVC transforms video compression and delivery

The history of video compression standardization has been dominated by efforts to maximize compression capability, and by the time when the development of HEVC was started an increasing variety of services, the growing popularity of HD video even in mobile applications, and the emerging beyond-HD formats (e.g. 4K×2K resolution) were creating even stronger needs for improved compression capabilities. HEVC has been designed to address essentially all existing applications of previous standards while particularly focusing on two key issues: increased video resolution and increased use of parallel processing architectures. While HEVC is a collaborative development by a large team of experts, managing to drive it into the direction needed by industry and supported by the processing capability of real-time systems is the celebrated accomplishment of its project leaders and chief editor.

From global broadcasting to streaming beyond Earth

The HEVC standard has become the primary video broadcast format in several countries, such as Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Croatia, and the Czech Republic. It has been adopted into the industry specifications of many other organizations in addition to those of ITU, ISO and IEC, including 3GPP, the 8K Association, ANSI/SCTE, ARIB, ATSC, BD ROM, CTA/CEA, Digital UK, ETSI/DVB, ETSI/EBU, IETF, NATO, MISB, and the Ultra HD Forum. Low-power decoders are available from basically all video chip makers, and its encoding is supported in nearly all professional video production workflows. NASA even announced in March 2026 that its NASA+ streaming service was using HEVC, including its video for the Artemis II crewed mission beyond the lunar orbit, making the standard extraterrestrial as well as international.

A standard with lasting global impact

HEVC is now supported in more than 90% of currently produced televisions, personal computers, mobile handsets, and web browsers, and it is very widely used by streaming service providers, television broadcasters, video recording devices and video security systems. The development of the HEVC standard received its first major award recognition with a Primetime Engineering Emmy Award for the JCT-VC in 2017. At the end of 2023, Futuresource Consulting estimated that “Over 96% of consumer video products sold today have HEVC playback capability, totaling 2.3 billion devices annually; and this is rising year over year”. The tremendous importance of efficient video compression technology becomes apparent when noting that about 80% of the traffic on the world's communication networks now consists of video data. In April 2026, NETINT reported that the percentage of video professionals using HEVC or planning to deploy it soon was approaching saturation level and had exceeded that of any other video format.

Fraunhofer HHI congratulates Benjamin Bross, Jens-Rainer Ohm and Gary J. Sullivan on this major recognition from IEEE of the global importance of the HEVC standard.