There's a new MPEG video standard making its way to us and its called High Efficiency Video Coding and it will be twice as efficient as current standards. What will this mean for all of us? It means downloading movies twice as fast or doubling their quality.

HEVC will arrive next year and the new standard could be launched in commercial products as early as 2013. Per Fröjdh, the manager for Visual Technology at Ericsson Research didn't specify what kind of products but it could mean processors for cellphones, tablets and graphic boards and set top boxes.

This is important because "video accounts for the vast majority of all data sent over networks, and that proportion is increasing: "by 2015, it is predicted to account for 90 percent of all network traffic," says Fröjdh.

Which means, providers might just be able to cram more content into the same pipes they are using now, and it means that your streaming will be less prone to failure and allow you to consume less bandwidth while watching video.

According to Steven Crowley, a white paper by Motorola observed that "history has shown that technological evolution typically results in ~10% – 20% annual improvement in encoder efficiency, with the efficiency doubling every 6 – 8 years as a result of technological breakthroughs."

[Ericsson via Steven Crowley]