Context: Access Advance is on a roll. It has recently signed up (and thereby settled multi-jurisdictional patent enforcement campaigns against) Roku (January 7, 2026 ip fray article) and Hisense (December 20, 2025 ip fray article). Last month it also announced the acquisition of Via’s High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, H.265) and Versatile Video Coding (VVC, H.266) pools (December 15, 2025 ip fray article).
What’s new: Today Access Advance and OPPO announced that OPPO has
- become a new VVC Advance licensee and
- renewed its HEVC Advance license.
The announcement notes that “[a]s a licensee of both the HEVC Advance and VVC Advance Patent Pools, OPPO is eligible to benefit from Access Advance’s Multi-Codec Bridging Agreement (MCBA), which is expected to provide an efficient licensing framework for products implementing multiple video codecs.”
Direct impact & wider ramifications: As shown in the table below, OPPO now has a multi-prong partnership in place with Access Advance, reflecting the Chinese smartphone maker’s sophistication in using its patent rights for strategic purposes while remaining a purely defensive (apart from retaliatory litigation) player:
| licensee? | licensor? | |
| HEVC Advance | yes (since 2020) | yes (since 2021) |
| VVC Advance | yes (since 2026) | not yet (maybe just to prevent ASUS from cheap access to a license) |
| Video Distribution Patent (VDP) Pool | no (OPPO makes devices, but this pool is for streaming services like Netflix) | yes |
It may just be a matter of time until when OPPO joins VVC Advance as a licensor, such as after one or more settlements and bilateral license deals, but at the moment it apparently considers it advantageous to be only a licensee. Five years ago, there were only a few months between OPPO’s taking a license to HEVC Advance and joining as a licensor.
Quotes from the parties
OPPO’s patent licensing chief Vincent Lin (who by now is clearly one of the industry’s leading and most well-respected licensing executives) said:
“OPPO’s decision to join the VVC Advance Patent Pool reflects our continued commitment to supporting balanced patent pool that benefits the entire video codec ecosystem. As both a technology innovator and implementer, we look forward to the collaborative licensing frameworks which supports long-term and healthy IP ecosystem for video technologies and provides clear and efficient pathways for adoption.”
Access Advance CEO Peter Moller said:
“We are pleased to welcome OPPO to the VVC Advance Patent Pool. OPPO’s participation in our HEVC and VDP programs as a Licensor and in our HEVC and VVC programs as a Licensee, demonstrates the value our pools provide to companies that are simultaneously driving innovation and implementing these critical video technologies. This comprehensive engagement underscores the industry’s recognition that our balanced approach serves the interests of patent owners and implementers alike.”