Implementing a New Codec in 2025: Key Factors to Consider
Transitioning to new codecs in the streaming industry is never an undertaking to be taken lightly, and bandwidth savings, encoding efficiency, and quality enhancements must be carefully considered and balanced against the challenges of ensuring playback capability for the broadest range of viewers who may be operating a motley assortment of legacy devices. Radiant Media Player’s Arnaud Leyder and United Cloud’s Boban Kasalovic offer their own deployment decision trees for implementing new codecs in this excerpt from a panel discussion with Streaming Learning Center’s Jan Ozer at Streaming Media Connect 2025.
Widespread Compatibility for a Multiplatform World
Streaming Learning Center Owner and Streaming Media Contributing Editor Jan Ozer opens this conversation by inviting CEO and Founder of Radiant Media Player Arnaud Leyder to discuss his company’s process for implementing a new codec. Radiant Media Player is a HTML5 video player that enables the creation of web, mobile, and OTT video apps.
Leyder says that widespread compatibility is the first element he looks for because “we are in a multi-platform world” and there’s no single, specific channel everyone sees. “You have to push on social media, on mobile apps, on your website. And I would say that my experience, from what I’m getting from our customers, is [that] for people dealing with industrial quantity, having a prototyping strategy—[an] end-to-end strategy—to test and validate your encoding from the server to the end device is of paramount importance,” Leyder says.
He cites the example of Instagram not currently supporting AV1 in WebM format. “It does work with H.264 and MP4, but if you try to upload a WebM AV1 video to Instagram, it will come back with an error message saying ‘incompatible file format.’ And [one of our customers is] using WebM and AV1 to stream with MPEG-DASH to the mobile apps and website with our player,” Leyder says. This customer also needs to be able to make its content available on other channels and platforms that have a variety of specifications.
Leyder emphasizes that for teams to perform seamless encoding with large quantities of video content, “it’s very important to make sure that once you push [the] encoding command, all of the [stream] from the server to the CDN to the player to the viewer—because now we’re talking about what the viewer is experiencing in terms of visual interface with HDR and other new visual effects like 3D—having that [an end-to-end prototyping] strategy is important if you want to not make mistakes and run through a lot of costs, having to re-encode hundreds and millions of videos because you miss one specific platform you wanted to support.” Thorough testing helps avoid those costly re-encoding processes.
The Cost Savings of Using HEVC
Speaking of keeping costs down, Ozer next turns to United Cloud Project Manager Boban Kasalovic to hear about the HEVC codecs his company uses and how it has decreased certain costs. United Cloud is an innovation center that offers 10 highly synergistic product lines within telco and media ecosystems. Ozer asks Kasalovic to speak to the process for implementing HEVC: How difficult was the decision? What needed to be considered?
Per Kasalovic, bandwidth savings and its widespread support on consumer devices were the top reasons to implement HEVC. He notes the cost implications of supporting multiple codecs and the strategic approach of telco operators to implement HEVC on high-viewership channels for significant cost reductions.
United Cloud made this decision two or three years ago, and the switch from AVC to HEVC was relatively smooth, says Kasalovic. It’s now United Cloud’s de facto standard for its system. “In our case, a crucial moment was that all first-screen devices, which [have] the biggest impact on viewership, supported HEVC in that time. But there is another side of that story. The more codecs we support, the more expensive the system is,” he explains.
His team still uses AVC in some cases, and with HEVC—and, in the future, AV1 in addition to that—there’s a seesaw in effect: While his company is “decreasing the cash cost and the distribution cost by 40%,” it is “increasing for storage and network cost for a primary distribution.”
Kasalovic points to a positive behavior of the viewership at telcos: The top 20–30 channels have viewership rates at about 90%. “Related to this, telco operators that we support implement HEVC, just on those top, let’s say 20 to 30 channels … have really big reduction on average bit rate, which gave them a really good cost savings. So that’s how we implement HEVC and make it [work],” he concludes.
Join us in May 2025 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at the next Streaming Media Connect.
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On Wednesday, February 26, digital video expert Jan Ozer will moderate the Streaming Media Connect panel "How to Meet the Challenges of New Codec Adoption and Deployment." Many of us want to see new codecs such as AV1 and VVC/H.266 succeed rapidly and bring the efficiencies and savings they were designed to deliver, but the reality is more complex. Codec adoption doesn't just depend on innovation; it's a marathon involving hardware readiness, market penetration, and achieving a 30% device compatibility threshold. This panel assembles transcoding experts from Evolution, Radiant Media Player, United Cloud, and AOM.
20 Feb 2025