How 5G Is Driving New Multimedia Standards and the Rise of VVC & 8K

Why Multimedia Needs Standardization in 5G

In the 5G era, the multimedia value chain mirrors that of 4G LTE, but real‑world user experience depends on the actual network implementation by operators. Once a video source exists, compression algorithms become necessary, and those algorithms must be standardized to ensure interoperability, prevent monopolies, and keep technology advanced.

Challenges for Media Applications in 5G

Video traffic already accounts for a growing share of IP traffic—projected to reach 82% by 2020—and will continue to rise with video conferencing, short‑form video, and cloud gaming. 5G introduces new media formats (4K, 8K), immersive experiences (VR/AR), cloud gaming, and autonomous driving, all of which demand higher bandwidth, lower latency, and higher reliability.

Emerging Media Formats: 8K

8K offers a resolution of roughly 7080×4320, dramatically increasing pixel count and visual clarity. It also pushes HDR brightness from the SDR level of ~100 nit to potentially 5,000–10,000 nit, and expands color depth from 8‑bit (256 colors) to 10‑ or 12‑bit (1,024–4,096 colors). Frame rates rise from the typical 30 fps to 60 fps, 120 fps, or even 180 fps, resulting in smoother motion but vastly larger raw file sizes—approximately 60 GB per second for uncompressed 8K at 120 fps, which can be reduced to ~60 MB after 1,000:1 compression.

8K Standardization and the 8K Industrial Alliance

Tencent Multimedia Lab joined the 8K Industrial Alliance in August, gaining a seat on the board and influencing future 8K standards. This participation helps align 8K specifications with 5G network capabilities and accelerates adoption in live broadcasts such as the 2022 Winter Olympics.

Frontier 5G Multimedia Compression Technologies

VVC (H.266) Overview

The video compression timeline includes AVC (H.264) in 2003, HEVC (H.265) in 2013, and now VVC (H.266). Each generation improves subjective visual quality by roughly 40‑50% and objective bitrate efficiency by 30‑33%. VVC achieves this through richer intra‑prediction (65 directions vs. 33 in HEVC), additional inter‑prediction modes, and support for both discrete cosine transform (DCT) and discrete sine transform (DST).

Tencent's VVC Contributions

Tencent Multimedia Lab has filed dozens of patents related to VVC and holds several chair positions in the standard‑setting groups. Their VVC encoder can reduce video file size by about 50% under the same perceptual quality, benefiting services such as WeChat, Tencent Video, and cloud gaming. In 2016, Tencent’s VVC implementation ranked third globally within two years of development, and the popular game "Honor of Kings" was added to the VVC test suite to demonstrate compression gains for interactive content.

Standard Adoption and Decoding

Beyond encoding, Tencent contributes to open‑source decoders and maintains implementations of VP9 and AV1, fostering a healthy video compression ecosystem. Efforts also focus on integrating VVC decoding into client devices to enable seamless playback of high‑quality streams.

Future Multimedia System Architecture: Heterogeneous Computing

Heterogeneous computing combines CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and specialized accelerators to meet the intensive compute demands of AI, deep learning, and high‑resolution video processing. In cloud gaming, video rendering occurs on GPU‑rich servers, compressed with VVC, and streamed to thin clients, eliminating the need for local installation or patching. Tencent’s lab collaborates with chip manufacturers to embed its codecs into hardware, supporting the broader 5G multimedia ecosystem.