ITU Study Group 16 has announced its long-awaited first stage approval of H.265, also known as the High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) standard. The standard improves video compression to the point of allowing twice as much video content to be encoded at roughly half the bit rate of the existing standard. It will succeed the current H.264/MPEG-4 standard.

MPEG-4 may still seem relatively new to companies in some parts of the world, but the technology has been available for more than 10 years, and numerous vendors of encoding systems and related products have been lining up in recent months and readying their support for H.265/HEVC. Ericsson, Fraunhofer and several other firms have either made announcements or showcased public demonstrations of their support for the new standard.

FierceTelecom: ITU gives first-stage approval of new MPEG successor, HEVC; TelecomTV content partner.