Context: Since acquiring competitor Via Licensing Alliance’s High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)/Versatile Video Coding (VVC) pools in December and becoming the sole administrator of VVC and HEVC pools in the market (December 15, 2025 ip fray article), Access Advance has seen a wave of new sign-ups. This includes OPPO, which joined its VVC program in January as a licensee (January 9, 2026 ip fray article), and Meta, which joined all three of the company’s video codec pools last week (HEVC, VVC, and Video Distribution (VDP)) after facing multi-country patent litigation with ETRI, Huawei, and Philips (July 3, 2026 ip fray article). The companies involved in the acquisition from Via had held a vote to change their pool administrator from Advance to Sisvel – but the vote failed last month, with more than ⅔ of the licensors voting against this change of administrator (June 5, 2026 ip fray article).
What’s new: Access Advance yesterday announced that Samsung Electronics and Sharp Corporation also joined its VVC pool as both licensors and licensees (July 5, 2026 Access Advance press release).
Direct impact: The announcement also reveals that, alongside Samsung and Sharp, four other companies have joined as licensees since the beginning of 2026: American Future Technology Corp. d/b/a iBuypower, CyberPower Inc., Sichuan Changhong NeoNet Technologies Co., Ltd., and TIGERSECU, Inc. And, it added, a further three licensors also joined the program in the first half of 2026: Vidaxio LLC, Mirage Inc., and Telechips, Inc.
Wider ramifications: With Samsung on board as a licensee, the VVC Advance pool now counts six of the world’s leading smartphone manufacturers: Honor, Huawei, OPPO, Samsung, vivo, and Xiaomi. Together, they represent approximately 62% of the global smartphone market and underline the substantial demand for video codec technologies from this industry.
In a statement today, Advance’s CEO, Peter Moller, noted that the growth the company is seeing in VVC Advance reflects the broad range of industries and companies that are moving toward VVC as the next standard for video delivery. He added:
“Samsung and Sharp joining as both licensors and licensees is significant, but so is the participation of leading smartphone brands and the range of consumer electronics and technology companies now executing licenses. We are building a program that reflects where the video market is actually heading.”
Access Advance also offers a license to a pool that covers all technologies for internet streaming: HEVC, VVC, AV1, and VP9 (January 16, 2025 ip fray article). Launched in January 2025, the company has also seen several new sign-ups in the past year, including Sharp, CB Cline, SK Planet, and Telechips (March 24, 2026 ip fray article) and Alibaba and Dahua last week (July 2, 2026 ip fray article).