HEVC, which stands for High Efficiency Video Coding, is a new video compression standard to expand the H.264/AVC coding standard, and on January 26, 2013, HEVC officially became an international standard.

In 2004, the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) began researching new technologies to create a new video compression standard, and in October of the same year, the H.264/AVC group investigated various potential technologies. Technical Areas (KTA), a software code base, was established in 2005 to evaluate these new "key technologies"