In June 2026, Globo switched on DTV+, Brazil’s TV 3.0 broadcast service, in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Brasília, timed to the opening of the FIFA World Cup. It is the world’s first national broadcast system to mandate MPEG-5 LCEVC, deployed alongside VVC, MPEG-H Audio and ATSC 3.0 physical layer under a presidential decree signed August 27, 2025.
Read as a television story, that is a milestone for one market. Read as an ecosystem story, it is something larger.
Between the August 2025 decree and the June 2026 launch, first-wave devices shipped on Amlogic and Realtek silicon. Intelbras, Century and Aquario put retail set-top boxes on shelves, and the first Hisense TVs entered dedicated showrooms. Broadcasters, infrastructure providers, chipset companies and consumer device manufacturers moved from mandate to retail in just over ten months.
As part of this roll out, LCEVC is no longer a technology waiting to be adopted. The picture is shifting to the ecosystem adopting it and the speed at which this new technology is going to be available to broadcasters, and beyond.
When that happens, the question for the rest of the industry should shift to “what does the availability of this technology make possible, and where and how could we leverage it elsewhere?”
The industry should ask why
Major ecosystems do not mandate new standards because compression efficiency looks good on a benchmark. They adopt them because they solve practical deployment problems.
Brazil’s SBTVD Forum ran a multi-phase evaluation to identify the technologies best suited to its next-generation system. It concluded that LCEVC solved a very specific one: delivering UHD services within constrained broadcast bandwidths as well as adding scalability, i.e. the possibility of carrying an additional UHD service on top of a usable HD service with minimal use of spectrum. In SBTVD Phase 3 testing, VVC plus LCEVC delivered 4K HDR at 7.59 Mbps against 16.58 Mbps for VVC alone in real-time tests (remember, we’re not talking about theoretical test models here). That is a 54% reduction, and it is what allows commercial DTV+ services to carry 2160p HDR at roughly 10 Mbps within a standard 6 MHz allocation.
While this is a very specific example, these are not uniquely Brazilian, nor broadcast problems. They are the same tensions found across modern video delivery: quality is increasing, processing and delivering has a cost and device transitions take time.
TV 3.0 as an example of what LCEVC is really for
LCEVC is sometimes described simply as another compression standard. That misses the point. It is an enhancement layer that works alongside any base codec such as AVC, HEVC, AV1 or VVC. In a typical configuration, the base codec processes a lower-resolution representation, while the LCEVC enhancement layer carries very efficiently the additional information required to reconstruct the full-resolution picture. This creates a layered architecture rather than forcing every improvement into a single, increasingly complex codec.
In DTV+, VVC provides the next-generation base codec and LCEVC helps make high-quality delivery more practical within the available broadcast capacity and receiver constraints. But TV 3.0 is one deployment of that architecture, not its definition. The broader idea is simple: use the base codec you need – either because it serves the purpose or constitutes a legacy baseline, then add a lightweight layer to improve efficiency, scalability and deployment flexibility.
Ready for ecosystems beyond TV3.0
Broadcast was the hardest place to prove this. Fixed spectrum with no headroom, hardware decode requirements on cost-constrained consumer silicon, a coordinated national roadmap and the need to align broadcasters, silicon, software and receiver manufacturers.
Beyond broadcast, Brazil validated three transferable properties. LCEVC delivers the efficiency gains claimed in controlled testing under real-world operating conditions. It runs on mass-market silicon and in software, and it can be deployed through a healthy, multi-vendor ecosystem.
But the problem TV 3.0 solved is not unique to broadcast. Broadcasters everywhere want UHD without more spectrum. Streamers want better quality without higher delivery costs. Sports platforms want UHD and high frame rates at scale, precisely where bitrate and processing pressure peak. Video services of every kind want to adopt newer codecs without multiplying their processing requirements.
The numbers transfer with honest scoping. The 54% figure belongs to broadcast conditions (real-time, low latency, CBR encoding) with a VVC base of a certain maturity. In OTT applications on AVC or HEVC bases, published evaluations typically show 30 to 40% bitrate savings at equivalent quality. Bandwidth is only part of the benefit: encoding a lower-resolution base reduces encoding complexity, and published research shows LCEVC cutting AV1 software decode time by 19 to 30% on 1080p content. The real benefits will depend on use cases, flexibility in deployment options and running platform realities.
Adoption outside broadcast may be simpler than the challenge Brazil has just met, where a degree of control can be exercised in the client ecosystem. This is true for pay-TV services, operating within controlled walled-gardens. Or streaming services where the mobile or web component is prevalent and decoding can ship as a software update to the app or player.
The scalability of LCEVC represents another technical deployment advantage. The enhancement layer can be delivered to a growing number of compatible devices, while legacy clients receive a base layer which remains fully conforming. A rollout becomes a cohort-by-cohort A/B test rather than a make-or-break migration.
The tooling is already in the plumbing of the streaming stack. GStreamer 1.26 ships native lcevcdec and lcevcenc elements developed by Collabora with V-Nova. Shaka Player supports LCEVC for DASH and HLS, and SDK integrations exist for ExoPlayer/AndroidX on Android, VLCKit, an Apple AVPlayer extension from V-Nova and DASH.js on the web. Furthermore, LCEVC works within established HLS, DASH, CMAF, CDN and DRM workflows, limiting the amount of delivery-infrastructure change required.
Finally, ATSC finalized A/345, its VVC video standard, in July 2025 with optional LCEVC-based scalability, codifying the same enhancement-layer path used in Brazil for North American broadcasters.
So, what’s next for consumer device and chipset manufacturers, LCEVC is now shipping in real products, on mass-market silicon and in software. The question is what else that capability could enable across the devices and platforms you build, from Pay TV set-top boxes to connected devices to streaming applications.
For broadcasters and operators in other markets, Brazil has demonstrated a route to next-generation television, and ATSC A/345 shows the path is codified beyond one country. The architecture lessons are available now, without waiting for your own market to mandate the same standard.
For streaming, live and premium sports platforms, the efficiency problem TV 3.0 solved is your problem too: higher resolutions, higher frame rates and growing delivery costs. You can address it progressively; one audience cohort at a time.
For video infrastructure and cloud platforms, a lighter base encode and reduced decode complexity change the economics of every workflow moving towards more advanced video experiences.
DTV+ is moving LCEVC from standards and demonstrations into real services and products. The next question is what the same architecture could enable beyond broadcast.
