HEVC (H.265) has definitely been on the fast-track for the last year, and the bandwidth savings nearly live up to the hype. At the recent Streaming Media West conference in Huntington Beach, California, Keith Wymbs, vice president of marketing for Elemental Technologies said the benefits are most impressive for high-def video.

"I think most of what we've seen even with the early demonstrations over the last 12 months or so have been anywhere from 40 and 45 percent. But we do see some elements where it is approaching 50 percent, particularly with  the higher resolutions," Wymbs said. "I think the pace of innovation that's been happening over the last year or so has been a lot faster, actually, than H.264, partially due to software-based architectures and the ability to take very powerful solutions and apply them to this problem."

But just because the rate of improvements has been fast doesn't mean HEVC will be adopted overnight. Look for adoption and continued innovation to last another decade.

"I think if you look at any video infrastructure today that's doing honestly even MPEG-2, but definitely H.264, there's going to be an evolution to HEVC over the next decade. It takes longer than everyone imagines it will take," Wymbs noted. "But, I think if you look at it from the satellite perspective, if you look at it from the cable perspective, telco, TV, or IPTV, and especially over-the-top -- where every bit that's delivered has an operational cost to it in terms of over-the-top delivery -- that immediate savings if you invest in the encode side into an HEVC solution, you can immediately be saving 40 percent of your delivery cost."