Xiaomi joins Access Advance HEVC patent pool as licensee, VVC patent pool as licensor, licensee

Context:

In August 2020, several Access Advance High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, H.265) sued Xiaomi in the Düsseldorf Regional Court for patent infringement. The licensors, which included Philips, Mitsubishi, General Electric, and IP Bridge, eventually settled with bilateral licensing agreements in 2022. 

In 2021, Access Advance launched its so-called Multi-Codec Bridging Agreement (MCBA), which allows licensees in both of its HEVC and Versatile Video Coding (VVC, H.266) pools to pay a substantially reduced royalty rate for products that include both codecs. In July, the licensors of each of the pools agreed to align the royalty caps for Advance’s MCBA and the VVC pool for licensees who sign the MCBA by the end of this year (July 22, 2025 ip fray article).

What’s new: Xiaomi has joined Access Advance’s HEVC patent pool as a licensee, and its VVC patent pool as both a licensor and licensee.

Direct impact: Xiaomi’s participation in Access Advance’s HEVC pool brings its total number of licensees up to 379, while the company is the pool’s 46th VVC licensor and 24th VVC licensee. It follows the news that Huawei also joined Access Advance’s VVC program as a licensee last month (October 9, 2025 ip fray article) and Sharp joined its HEVC pool as a licensor (after already being a licensee for some time) in September.

Wider ramifications: In an interview with ip fray, Access Advance’s Senior Vice President of Licensing and Market Intelligence Dylan Zhou said he hopes this news will encourage the few major implementers that remain unlicensed for HEVC in the market to join. For example, Access Advance is seeking to license Chinese companies Hisense and Transsion – both of which are currently engaged in patent infringement suits by several Access Advance licensors (August 4, 2025 ip fray article). “We expect more to come in the next couple of months – there is little doubt they will join eventually, we just hope they do it soon,” Mr. Zhou said.

In a statement today, Access Advance’s CEO Peter Moller said the company is “delighted” to welcome Xiaomi to the Access Advance licensing community. Xiaomi’s participation in both the HEVC and VVC patent pools represents a significant milestone in the video codec licensing landscape, he noted, adding:

“Their joining of the HEVC Advance Patent Pool, which provides them with access to tens of thousands of essential patents for the widely adopted H.265 standard, and their dual role as both a licensor and licensee in the VVC Advance Patent Pool, demonstrates their commitment to innovation and the recognition of the value of patent pools that balance the interest of patent owners and implementers.”

“We thank the Xiaomi team for their professionalism and collaborative spirit throughout this process,” Mr. Moller said.

Also in a statement today, Xiaomi’s general manager of corporate business development and IP strategy, Na Wei, said the company is pleased to join Access Advance’s pools. The agreement, she noted, reflects Xiaomi’s commitment to supporting a balanced and sustainable innovation ecosystem:

“Xiaomi has been a key contributor to global standardization and has consistently invested heavily in R&D since our foundation.”
‘Hope for a market evolution’
Speaking with ip fray, Mr. Zhou said the pool administrator has a long-running relationship with Xiaomi, with discussions going as far back as 2017. “They were one of the first potential licensees that I met upon joining Advance,” he revealed.

Even when Advance licensors asserted their patents and eventually signed bilateral licences, “we never gave up and continued to seek engagement with Xiaomi”, he noted, adding that the structure of the pools – with licensees permitted to pay the VVC rate for both the HEVC and VVC pool licenses – makes it a “no-brainer” decision for companies like Xiaomi as VVC adoption starts to gain significant traction in the market.

Xiaomi was an “exceptional” story. It faced lawsuits by Advance licensors, initially chose to settle those bilaterally, and has now eventually signed up to both of Advance’s multimedia codec pools. And, according to Mr. Zhou, this demonstrates that patent pools are the “ultimate solution”:

“There may be temporary solutions that companies can cobble together to deal in the short-term… but they understand or eventually they all realise that trying to come up with a solution themselves is not the most optimal solution in the long-term. And this was the case for Xiaomi too.”

As well as encouraging licensees to join its pools, Mr. Zhou hopes the move by Xiaomi will prompt a “market evolution”, helping the market move further on in the consolidation of patents in both the HEVC and VVC pools managed by Advance. Licensors are attracted by licensees, he noted, so the more licensees onboard, the more licensors will follow.

He also emphasized the company’s focus on China – and the greater Asian region – noting that they have already gained a lot of support in those markets, not only with the many Asian licensors and licensees in the HEVC and VVC device pools, but also recent success on attracting Alibaba, ByteDance, Kuaishou, NTT Docomo, OPPO, Tencent, and many other Asian companies to its new streaming pool (LINK HERE). “We are very transparent and disciplined, and licensors and licensees tend to trust us because of that,” he commented, adding:

It’s a lot of work, I travelled to Asia almost once a month this year. But we work hard to earn the trust of the Asian market, and the trust is very important for us to complete collaboration deals like with Xiaomi.”