When we first heard of HEVC it was supposed to be the next big thing. And it surely is, but are the impressive gains we first heard of, really good for any usage scenario?

Realistic official data claimed up to 40% less bandwidth used with much more encoding power needed to do the job. First usable demos we saw were of 720p videos at 2 Mbps. For internet streaming across the world, and for companies who pay dearly for their bandwidth this was a milestone, as the streams could now be labeled as a HD and not without reason, the quality was more than acceptable.

But, coming down to SD and lower bandwidth, HEVC domination versus H.264 is no longer that clear cut. Using the latest H.264 advances 1 Mbps streams are much closer in quality to HEVC. The difference in bandwidth/quality is much closer to 20 than 40 percent here. All too logical, since HEVC was made with 4K in mind. Still, ~200 Kbps you gain could be used to either increase quality (and through that the customer satisfaction), or decrease bandwidth and reduce your OPEX.

So, unlike HD, Full HD and UHD (in which HEVC excels), SD is much more of an open battle right now. The expenses of introducing HEVC throughout the ecosystem from the encoder to STB are quite high at this point in time. The gains are there, but not big enough to warrant big investments in a smaller business environment (especially knowing that beside the encoding costs, clients would have to replace their set-top boxes as well).

As for tablets and similar devices, almost any new device sold in a last couple of years can play HEVC in SD resolution. Only the newest SOCs have hardware supported HEVC playback, while all others will have to burden the CPU and thus run through battery much quicker, decreasing the quality of the user experience significantly.

So, since this is not 2017, jumping to HEVC right now is still not a win-win scenario.

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