Exploring Low Latency 4K Streaming through VVC

Accelerated demand for superior quality streaming over the internet has resulted in exponential growth in high-resolution television/4K streaming, and Versatile Video Coding (VVC), also known as H.266, is the latest video coding technology that is designed to aid further in the process. VVC is witnessing a steady adoption rate by international standards bodies such as DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting). Most promisingly, its efficient bitrates can deliver significant cost savings and reduce energy consumption for streaming, making it an even more attractive proposition for content broadcasters for 4K low latency streaming.

VVC or Versatile Video Coding is a new and evolving video compression standard, also known as H.266. Developed by the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET) at the International Telecommunication Union (UN specialized agency for information and communication technologies – ICTs) in 2020, VVC is predicted to be the future of video streaming, particularly video conferencing, OTT streaming, and mobile telephony. It’s a hybrid codec that is particularly complex and most standard streaming hardware is not yet equipped to use this codec. However, the VVC boasts of extremely good performance – its target compression performance is a 30% to 50% bitrate reduction as compared to the HEVC Main Profile with the same perceptual quality and an encoding complexity of approximately 10 times or more than HEVC.

VVC is an emerging standard but it has tremendous potential to revolutionize the OTT industry with its high compression performance compared to existing codecs like H.264 and H.265. The codec was named Versatile Video Coding because it is “meant to be very versatile and addresses all of the video needs from low resolution and low bit rates to high resolution and high bitrates, HDR, 360 omnidirectional, and so on.”

Several challenges exist in the realm of 4K streaming. These challenges span various aspects, including technological, infrastructure, and content-related issues. Please note that the situation may have evolved, and advancements might have occurred since then. Here are some of the challenges associated with 4K streaming:

Now let’s consider a couple of codecs that might be considered less suitable for 4K video encoding:

However, it’s essential to note that the landscape of video codecs is dynamic, and advancements are continually being made. Newer codecs, such as VVC are specifically designed to offer better compression efficiency for high-resolution content like 4K video. It’s recommended to use these newer codecs for 4K video encoding to achieve better quality at lower bitrates.

The Versatile Video Coding (VVC) codec is a standard developed by the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET), which is a collaboration between the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). VVC has been designed to provide improved compression efficiency compared to its predecessors, such as High-Efficiency Vi