The new Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard advances the state of the art of video compression and has unprecedented application versatility.

This latest edition has the flexibility to enable emerging applications such as 360° omnidirectional immersive multimedia, remote screen sharing, cloud-based collaboration, cloud gaming and region-based extraction and merging. On top of that, it offers improved quality encoding for ultra-high definition (UHD) and high-dynamic-range (HDR) video as well as conventional video coding applications.

The experts team responsible for the development of VVC recently agreed the technical specification of the new standard, moving VVC toward final ITU approval with the ‘consent’ to enter the concluding ‘last call’ phase of its standardisation process. It will be published as ITU H.266 | ISO/IEC 23090-3.

VVC results from the work of the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET), the latest team to lead the longstanding collaboration of the ITU-T Study Group 16 Video Coding Experts Group and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (Moving Picture Experts Group, MPEG).

“The video compression algorithms standardised in collaboration by ITU, ISO and IEC continue to enable giant leaps forward in video quality,” ITU secretary-general Houlin Zhao says.

“They are also central to industry’s ability to meet rising demand for video, the most bandwidth-intensive source of data exchanged over global networks.”

JVET co-chair Gary J. Sullivan says the VVC is a result of global collaboration of video coding which has joined forces again to produce a major advance in video compression technology.

“VVC is more than yet another compression standard. Its versatility comes from combining well-established and novel technology elements. The design has been rigidly tested with various application cases in mind,” JVET co-chair Jens-Rainer Ohm explains.

Video now accounts for around 80% of all online traffic.