Introduction: BEYOND HEVC

Abstract

The internet was not designed for the transportation of video content. However, over the past ten years, video traffic on the internet has increased dramatically, rising from one-third of all traffic in 2008 to roughly 82% in 2020. i This growth, in part, reflects the effects of the transition from analog to digital television broadcasting in 2009 and in the shift of media and entertainment transmission from serial digital interface (SDI), standardized by SMPTE in 1989, to video over IP, standardized by SMPTE in ST 2110 in 2013. Video over IP enables the widespread streaming of video content, exemplified for most consumers in the form of video-on-demand (VOD) systems, such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, and in the creation of video channels on the internet by YouTube, BuzzFeed Video, and others. At the same time, video content has become more data-intensive with greater reliance on the display of content in high dynamic range (HDR), high frame rate (HFR), and wide color gamut (WCG), not to mention the growth of a consumer market for 4K content and experimental forays into the streaming of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) material. All of these developments amount to more and more data that need to be squeezed through the existing internet infrastructure. Cisco predicts that, by 2021, video over IP will be the equivalent of the transmission of 7.2 billion DVDs a month.