DVB World was held in the picturesque city of Prague on 10-12 March 2014. Zetacast’s Ken McCann gave a presentation that explained the main features of High Efficiency Coding (HEVC) and described how it is being incorporated into the DVB suite of standards.

His presentation included an update on “McCann’s Law”, a prediction that the bit-rate required to achieve broadcast quality video halves every 7 years, which he first made at DVB World in 2003. He explained that the bit-rate reduction is due to a combination of occasional changes of the video coding standard, approximately once per decade, and a process of encoder evolution within each standard. He illustrated this by showing the typical bit-rate reduction that has been experienced in practice with MPEG-2, H.264/AVC and now HEVC. The Chairman of the DVB project described this as the “most important slide of the conference”.