Alibaba Group join Access Advance VDP Pool as standard-essential licensee

Alibaba's full participation in the VDP Pool signals a shift toward centralized licensing for tech giants managing multi-platform video at scale. By licensing HEVC, VVC, VP9, and AV1 simultaneously, Alibaba reduces the legal complexity of its global streaming and live-commerce operations, which increasingly rely on these codecs for bandwidth efficiency. This move validates the VDP Pool’s 'one license, four codecs' model as a viable path for the industry's largest players to hedge against patent litigation across competing standards. For the broader market, it suggests that even nominally 'royalty-free' codecs like AV1 and VP9 are being swept into consolidated commercial patent pools. Watch for other major content distributors to trade independent settlements for these collective frameworks through late 2026.

The expansion of Alibaba's licensing relationship follows a year of significant consolidation and strategic moves within the video patent landscape. Per Access Advance, June 2026, the company recently acquired Via Licensing Alliance’s HEVC and VVC patent programs, rebranding them as the VCL Advance Pool. This acquisition, which concentrated thousands of standard-essential patents under one administrator, survived a June 2026 challenge where a group of licensors led by Orange unsuccessfully attempted to migrate the assets to Sisvel, per reporting from ip fray in June 2026. This stability has bolstered the VDP Pool's effort to position itself as the primary clearinghouse for streaming patent rights.

Alibaba's focus on codec efficiency is directly tied to its massive infrastructure investment and competitive pressures in the Chinese market. Per Reuters, May 2026, Alibaba is currently preparing the launch of its 'Tmall Box Office' (TBO) streaming service to compete with ByteDance and Tencent. Meanwhile, the company’s AI division, Alibaba Cloud, released the 'HappyHorse 1.1' video generation model in June 2026, citing a $52.7 billion infrastructure buildout to support enterprise-grade video synthesis. As noted by streaming industry analysts in March 2026, large-scale distributors are increasingly opting for consolidated licensing pools to avoid the multi-eight-figure annual royalties that can accrue when tracking individual codec usage across billions of monthly active users.

Furthermore, the timing of Alibaba's move aligns with shifting global infrastructure standards. Per a Netint industry report from April 2026, AV1 deployment is projected to reach 57% of organizations by the end of 2026, marking a 231% increase in adoption within two years. By securing rights to both these emerging standards and incumbent technologies like HEVC through the VDP Pool, Alibaba ensures its e-commerce platforms—which dominated the $3.8 billion live-commerce market in 2025 per Dataintelo—can continue scaling without the threat of fragmented patent litigation hindering their technical pipelines.