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Emmy® Award for HEVC, key tech behind ultra-high definition TV, goes to joint team.

The Emmy Awards celebrate more than the people telling stories on screen. They celebrate the innovative technology that brings you those stories. This year, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is receiving an Engineering Emmy Award. A Cisco team worked with peers from other leading technology organizations on this breakthrough, and we’re incredibly proud to have been a part.

HEVC is compression coding that enables efficient delivery of ultra-high definition (UHD) content. It’s been adopted by all UHD television distribution channels, from satellite to cable to wireless, and across devices like televisions, mobile phones, and tablets.

HEVC enables larger and more flexible data blocks for greater efficiency

Each frame of video that you see includes multiple pieces of data, or blocks. Compression is based on only sending data that changes from data block to data block within a video frame. In brief, HEVC enables larger and more flexible data blocks for greater efficiency. That enables the higher quality video we all prefer these days. We know this first-hand from our own video collaboration customers.

HEVC was developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC). The team includes a group of engineers from the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

The Emmy Engineering Award goes to an individual, company, or organization for developments in engineering that are either so extensive an improvement on existing methods, or so innovative in nature, that they materially affect the transmission, recording, or reception of television. The awards will be presented October 25, at the Loews Hollywood Hotel.

Learn more about the 69th Engineering Emmy Awards in the Emmy press release.