SMPTE looks at the future of HEVC

The famous SMPTE logo...

The influential Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers has been talking about the future directions that HEVC might take now that its effectively out in the wild. And it's interesting stuff

 In its April 2013 Newswatch newsletter, it publishes the thoughts of Walt Husak, longtime SMPTE member and director of image technologies at Dolby Laboratories - one of those people who says things, and everyone else rather sensibly listens. To read the whole interview you'll have to go to the SMPTE site, but his points can be summarised thus:

1. The development of HEVC was originally driven by the need for bigger images at lower bitrates and, as time goes by, other tools and applications will get folded in
2. The result is there will be a difference between the actual HEVC standard and the implementation
3. Efforts for scalable and multi-view extensions to the core codec are already underway
4. Range extensions are also under development, which will allow HEVC tech to provide different values at different bit rates and operational points, depending on the application
5. There is a distinct possibility that HEVC may eventually replace MPEG-2 as the main broadcast standard in the USA