A new industry group called HEVC Advance is threatening to demand royalties for the new HEVC video codec that could halve the bandwidth required for streaming online video or offer higher resolutions with the same bandwidth usage. The organization is promising to demand a royalty of 0.5 percent of revenue from any broadcaster that uses the codec for streaming. This move could re-ignite the arguments surrounding video codecs on the Web and may well jeopardize services such as Netflix's year-old 4K streaming service. H.264, the de facto standard for video compression in online streaming video, has long had a shadow cast over its existence due to its patents and the royalties that must be paid for their licensing. A consortium called MPEG LA, representing many of the different patent holders that have intellectual property relevant to H.264 including Apple, Samsung, and Fujitsu, collects royalties on H.264 encoder and decoder hardware and software. However, to ensure that…
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