This is an older report by Gartner that just caught our eye, but we just found the news so refreshing — and predictable — that we couldn’t pass it up. The long and the short of the $500 report is that H.264 has finally won the codec competition and that in the next few years everything will be encoded with it. Although this makes sense to standardize on a codec going forward, it is hard for us to imagine over-the-air broadcast TV changing from MPEG-2 in the next four years. While it is true that H.264 has been part of the ATSC spec for a few years now, with all that equipment out in the field already it is hard to imagine much of it getting replaced again in the next 10 years, never the less the next four.

Gartner predicts that by 2013, 95 percent of video will be H.264 originally appeared on Engadget HD on Tue, 22 Sep 2009 11:50:00 EST.

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