Context: Earlier this year, a decision by the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) of China related to the dispute between video surveillance equipment maker Dahua and Access Advance became known (January 9, 2026 ip fray article). Dahua is one of the top three companies in its field. The market leader is Hikvision, another Chinese company.
What’s new: Hikvision is now listed in the HEVC Advance section of pool administrator Access Advance’s website as both a licensor and a licensee.
Direct impact: This is major progress for HEVC Advance in an important vertical, without any litigation being known.
Wider ramifications: The fact that market leader Hikvision accepted Access Advance’s terms weakens the position of Dahua when arguing that those terms are not acceptable for surveillance camera makers. It also raises the question of competitive distortions when Hikvision is paying royalties while Dahua is not.
Access Advance’s High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, H.265) licensing program is one of the most successful patent pools. As mentioned earlier this week, patent pools have brought hundreds of thousands of licensor-licensee pairs together (April 21, 2026 ip fray article).
A new study on the HEVC video licensing landscape is being offered now, and it alleges that only approximately 35% of all HEVC-essential patents can be licensed through pools. In practical terms, that means mostly HEVC Advance, but also Via’s HEVC pool (which Advance has recently agreed to acquire), and Velos Media. HEVC Advance alone is widely regarded in the industry as covering approximately 75%-80% of all HEVC-essential patents.
The study is based on essentiality assessments made by an AI system that takes positions allegedly 85% consistent with human analysis based on a sample. While AI tools can be of assistance to patent professionals in different ways (for example, some patent offices use them for prior art search), they are not good enough to make determinations. Some AI systems will have a higher degree of consistency with human determinations than others. But when critical tasks are left to AI, strange things can happen. A very well-known U.S. law firm that is also quite active in patent litigation has just had to apologize to a judge for fake citations (April 23, 2026 CNN.com article).
There is no question that some significant innovators do not license their HEVC patents through pools. But it is, at minimum, misleading to suggest that someone who takes the relevant pool licenses solves only approximately a third of the problem. We raised a question about this on LinkedIn: which HEVC patent holders who are not pool licensors are seen enforcing their patents.
Some patentees do not have licensing programs and do not enforce. Such companies are also among HEVC Advance’s licensors, such as Samsung. But in any event, the problem-solving capacity of a pool license is a function of who else is left for a licensee to potentially deal with bilaterally. Nokia, Ericsson, and InterDigital license directly, and all three have recently asserted HEVC patents in court. The same applies to Broadcom. DivX is a special case because the company did not participate in standards development, but even if one included them, pool licenses would greatly reduce the need to negotiate bilateral licenses.