For the past 14 years, the H.264 video compression standard has been used to provide fast, ubiquitous, and cheap video encoding in content delivery networks (CDNs) across the globe.

But H.264 is inefficient at compressing video by modern standards. It struggles to render high-quality images, and also doesn’t support resolutions over 4K. All of these limitations are problematic in the age of ultra-high-definition (UHD) video streaming.

In response, CDN operators are transitioning to H.265, or the High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC). HEVC provides a 50 percent improvement in file compression over its predecessor while delivering the same image quality. And it supports 8K resolutions.