The expert group responsible for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)—the video compression standard that has emerged as the primary coding format for Ultra-High Definition (UHD) TV— has been awarded an Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in engineering.
Awarded by the U.S. Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the Emmy honors the achievements of the ISO/IEC Moving Pictures Expert Group of ISO/IEC JTC1 subcommittee 29 and the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding, a team of experts representing the ITU Video Coding Experts Group of ITU-T Study Group 16.
The award is the second Primetime Emmy to recognize the prestige of the video coding work driven in collaboration by IEC, ISO, and ITU.
ISO Secretary-General Sergio Mujica said it is a real pleasure to see the work of the experts recognized in this way.
“This group, which is at the forefront of innovation and technology in video, shows how successful we can be when we work together with a common aim,” Mujica said.
HEVC, published as ISO/IEC 23008-2 | ITU-T H.265, was recognized with an Emmy Award for forging the path to UHD “4K” and “8K” TV.
HEVC was released in 2013 to support the next decade of innovation in video. HEVC uses half the bandwidth of MPEG-4 | H.264 AVC, delivering an HD viewing experience while concurrently enabling operators to utilize network capacity more efficiently. The standard has proven especially valuable in accelerating the rollout of UHD.
The video coding collaboration of IEC, ISO and ITU is working towards 2020 with the aim of delivering a new video coding standard to succeed HEVC.