Samsung and Sharp join VVC Advance pool, covering 62% of smartphones

The inclusion of Samsung and Sharp consolidates a substantial majority of essential VVC patents under a single licensing program, reducing technical and legal friction for device manufacturers. With 62% of the global smartphone market now licensed, VVC is transitioning from a specialized broadcast standard to a mainstream mobile video codec. This scale is critical for streaming services considering 8K delivery or 4K HDR at lower bitrates, as it provides the necessary hardware installed base. Watch for whether this momentum triggers a shift in content delivery from HEVC to VVC among major streaming platforms in 2027.

The expansion of the VVC Advance pool arrives as the industry navigates a fragmented codec landscape. While HEVC remains the dominant format for 4K and HDR content, Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is designed to offer a 30% to 50% improvement in compression efficiency over its predecessor. Per Streaming Media, March 2025, while software-only VVC playback has been demonstrated by firms like ByteDance and Tencent, widespread commercial adoption has been gated by the availability of dedicated hardware silicon required to handle VVC's higher computational complexity.

Technological support for VVC began surfacing in flagship chipsets as early as 2022. MediaTek, which powers roughly 70% of the world's smart TVs, integrated VVC decoding into its Pentonic 700 and 2000 series SoCs, as reported by HDTVTest, August 2022. More recently at Computex in June 2024, MediaTek unveiled the Pentonic 800, which features a hardware video decoding engine supporting VVC for high-quality 4K video playback. This hardware push is a prerequisite for the device-level adoption cited by Access Advance.

Competition between VVC and the royalty-free AV1 codec continues to shape strategic roadmaps. While platforms like YouTube and Netflix have aggressively deployed AV1 for mobile to leverage its open-source status, Qualcomm executives have suggested that VVC may offer superior encoding efficiency for mobile recording applications. According to Android Authority, January 2023, Qualcomm hinted it might prioritize VVC over AV1 for future mobile encoding capabilities. The entry of Samsung—a pivotal player in both the smartphone and display markets—into the VVC Advance pool suggests a multi-codec strategy is becoming the industry standard to manage regional licensing preferences and specialized 8K requirements.