A LinkedIn post by Nokia’s Susanne Martikainen has drawn our attention to the fact that version 17 of Google’s Android mobile operating system adds support for the Versatile Video Coding (VVC, H.266) standard. The canonical sources a February 13, 2026 blog post by Google on the first beta of Android 17 and a long list of VVC-related constants in the MediaCodecInfo.CodecProfileLevel class:
Google is known to prefer supposedly (though not necessarily practically) “royalty-free” standards such as VP9 and AV1. It has never been an early adopter of mainstream FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing) video standards. But it has previously opted for pragmatic solutions. When Access Advance announced a 100% renewal rate among a certain cohort of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, H.265) licensees, Google was one of the most significant names among them (January 22, 2026 ip fray article).
Now that Google has decided to adopt VVC, it probably won’t take long before license agreements will become known. Access Advance also runs a VVC pool, and companies like Google can combine a license to patents essential to the two standards through the Multi-Codec Bridging Agreement (MCBA). The LinkedIn post mentioned further above talks about Nokia’s contributions to the standard (“Our team contributed key technical innovations across video coding tools, high-level syntax, and video metadata signaling”), and that is an example of a major video patent holder who licenses bilaterally. And those are just two examples.