Fraunhofer HHI today revealed their latest video compression standard H.266/Versatile Video Codec (VVC), which is set to eventually replace the current H.265/HEVC standard. The new standard was developed by Fraunhofer HHI in partnership with industry partners including Apple, Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Sony. The standard follows previous iterations promising a 50% reduction in bit-rate while maintaining the same quality.

Fraunhofer HHI claims that the new standard will play a major role in video transmission and storage however it is unknown if companies and consumers will adopt the standard. HEVC was released back in 2013 but is only now seven years later starting to see significant support, Fraunhofer plans to release the first software encoder/decoder this spring while hardware chips will likely take much longer. The major streaming giants such as Google and Netflix will likely determine when or if the standard becomes mainstream.