in early 2016 and published in early 2017, covering video containing rendered graphics, text, or animation as well as (or instead of) camera-captured video scenes. In October 2017, the standard was recognized by a Primetime Emmy Engineering Award as having had a material effect on the technology of television. HEVC contains technologies covered by patents owned by the organizations that participated in the JCT-VC. Implementing a device or software application that uses HEVC may require a license from HEVC patent holders. The ISO/IEC and ITU require companies that belong to their organizations to offer their patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing (RAND) terms. Patent licenses can be obtained directly from each patent holder, or through patent licensing bodies, such as MPEG LA, Access Advance, and Velos Media. The combined licensing fees currently offered by all of the patent licensing bodies are higher than for AVC. The licensing fees are one of the main reasons HEVC adoption has been low on the web and is why some of the largest tech companies (Amazon, AMD, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, and more) have joined the Alliance for Open Media, which finalized royalty-free alternative video coding format AV1 on March 28, 2018. History The HEVC format was jointly developed by more than a dozen organisations across the world. The majority of active patent contributions towards the development of the HEVC format came from five organizations: Samsung Electronics (4,249 patents), General Electric (1,127 patents), M&K Holdings (907 patents), NTT ( patents), and JVC Kenwood (628 patents). Other patent holders include Fujitsu, Apple, Canon, Columbia University, KAIST, Kwangwoon University, MIT, Sungkyunkwan University, Funai, Hikvision, KBS, KT and NEC. Previous work In 2004, the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) began a major study of technology advances that could enable creation of a new video compression standard (or substantial compression-oriented enhancements of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard). In October 2004, various techniques for potential enhancement of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard were surveyed. In January 2005, at the next meeting of VCEG, VCEG began designating certain topics as "Key Technical Areas" (KTA) for further investigation. A software codebase called the KTA codebase was established for evaluating such proposals. The KTA software was based on the Joint Model (JM) reference software that was developed by the MPEG & VCEG Joint Video Team for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. Additional proposed technologies were integrated into the KTA software and