HEVC Advance is the licensing program administrator for a patent pool licensing patents essential to practicing the High Efficiency Video Coding video standard, which is also known as MPEGH Part 2 and H.265. HEVC/H.265 is an advanced video compression standard developed through a collaboration between the ITU and ISO/IEC MPEG standard setting organizations. As of April 2020, more than 150 licensees had signed the HEVC Advance Patent Portfolio License, which then included 30 licensors with over 10,000 HEVC/H.265 essential patents.
History
On March 26, 2015, HEVC Advance that, when first offered, its HEVC Patent Portfolio License would include at least 500 essential HEVC patents owned by the founding licensors. On July 22, 2015, HEVC Advance its initial HEVC patent licensing program, with royalty rates based on the country/territory of sale, type of device, HEVC profile, HEVC extensions, and HEVC optional features. HEVC Advance specified that the Patent Portfolio License would license devices that included a decoder, an encoder, or a combination of decoder and encoder, with royalties based on each device implementing at least the Main/Main10 Profiles, and with additional royalties due if the device also implemented any one of more of the Advanced Profiles in version 2 of the standard: Multiview, Range Extension, and Scalable. In addition, HEVC Advance announced that the Patent Portfolio License would be required for, and assess royalties on, content. The HEVC Advance Patent Portfolio License provided two sets of royalty rates based on whether the country/territory into which the device or content was sold to an end user was classified by HEVC Advance as Region 1 or Region 2. Region 1 included the United States, Canada, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and others. All countries/territories not listed as Region 1 were classified for licensing purposes as Region 2. For Region 1, the Patent Portfolio License provided a minimum royalty rate of US$0.40 per device, and a maximum royalty rate of US$2.60 per device, and a content royalty rate of 0.5% of the revenue generated from HEVC video services. For Region 2, the Patent Portfolio License provided a minimum royalty rate of US$0.20 per device, and a maximum royalty rate of US$1.30 per device, and a content royalty rate of 0.5% of the revenue generated from applicable HEVC video services. The HEVC Advance Patent Portfolio License offered discounts on royalty rates for licensees who remained in compliance with their license obligations, and further discounts for licensees who agreed to mark their products and services with the HEVC Advance trademark under the HEVC Advance Trademark program. The total value of these discounts was 25% off the standard rates. The proposed licensing terms, especially the proposal to base content royalties on a portion of gross revenue, were criticized by content companies. The CTO of MLB Advanced Media - one of the largest streaming platforms in the U.S. - opined that no mainstream company would accept those terms. Following the feedback from the industry, HEVC Advance to its license program December 18, 2015. The revised Patent Portfolio License included lower maximum device royalty rates, a waiver of royalties on content that was free to end users including ad-supported content, and reduced royalty rates for distribution of HEVC content paid for by consumers on a title by title basis or on a subscription basis. In addition, the revised license program introduced caps on annual royalties including a company-wide cap for devices of US$40 million and a US$5 million cap for content. On November 22, 2016, HEVC Advance to its licensing terms, providing that certain types of software implementation of HEVC could be distributed directly to consumer mobile devices and personal computers royalty free and without requiring a patent license. In June 2017, HEVC Advance a branch office in Tokyo, Japan to manage its licensing efforts in Asia. In October 2017, responding to the evolving market environment and in an effort to accelerate adoption of HEVC/H.265 in lower-price devices, HEVC Advance in royalty rates for many lower-price devices in the Connected Home and Other Devices category, including a range of lower rates for set-top boxes and surveillance cameras. In March 2018, HEVC Advance for all non-physical HEVC content distribution, including internet streaming, cable, over-the-air broadcast, and satellite. At the same time, HEVC Advance further expanded the range of reduced Region 1 rates for lower-price devices in the Connected Home and Other Devices category, reduced its combined US$45MM Device and Content Distribution Enterprise caps to a single Enterprise cap of US$40MM, and expanded its Trademark Program discounts to include physical media. By October 2019, 26 licensors had to make their HEVC essential patents available in the HEVC Advance Patent Portfolio License, including Canon, NTT, NTT Docomo, Fraunhofer, SK Telecom, JVCKenwood Corp., NEC Corp., Intellectual Discovery Co., Ltd., and Korea Patent Investment Corporation. In January 2020, HEVC Advance announced that LG and Huawei had joined as licensors, making their HEVC essential patents available in the HEVC Advance Patent Portfolio License. Also in January 2020, nine licensors who had been licensors' in both the MPEG-LA and HEVC Advance patent pools left MPEG-LA's HEVC patent pool, remaining as licensors solely in the HEVC Advance patent pool. In March 2020, HEVC Advance announced that Toshiba had joined as a licensor, and Samsung, which had joined the HEVC Advance patent pool in April 2017, also withdrew as a licensor from the MPEG-LA HEVC Patent Pool. As of April 2020, the HEVC Advance Patent Portfolio License included more than 10,700 patents, the first HEVC patent pool license to include more than 10,000 patents. At the time, that number represented an estimated 60% to 70% of all HEVC-essential patents, and was approximately 6,500 more patents than the number of HEVC essential patents then available to new licensees in the MPEG-LA license.
Licensors
As of April 1, 2020 the following companies licensed their HEVC essential patents in the HEVC Advance Patent Portfolio License. The current list of licensors can be found on the , and the current list of patents can be found on the of the HEVC Advance . Each patent holder licensing its HEVC essential patents in the HEVC Advance Patent Portfolio License also makes those patents available for license on a bilateral basis for implementers who prefer to license bilaterally.
HEVC Advance Licensors
initially participated in the formation of the HEVC Advance Patent Pool, and announced in December 2015 that it would join HEVC Advance as a licensor. In January 2016, Technicolor SA reversed course and decided that rather join HEVC Advance it would directly license its HEVC patents on a bilateral basis. HEVC Advance previously listed 12 patents from Technicolor. Technicolor SA subsequently sold its patent licensing business, including its HEVC patents, to Interdigital in 2019. Technicolor SA became an HEVC Advance licensee in 2019 by executing an HEVC Advance Patent Portfolio License.
