MPEG recently did something it has never done before. Despite the surging demand for video, it is often difficult – or prohibitively costly – to deliver high video quality to all end users. Next-generation codecs provide a solution, but their use at scale requires a long wait for a sufficient proportion of devices to be able to decode them. As we have learnt from the long rollout of HEVC and VP9, there still remains a long tail of devices that are still only able to decode the previous generation codecs. This challenge is only becoming worse as the fragmentation and number of new and forthcoming codec options multiplies. No wonder that many large operators were looking for novel solutions to this problem, and in 2018 a broad array of leaders in the industry asked MPEG to pursue a new direction. After a successful call for proposals, in March 2019 the draft standard specification of MPEG-5 Part 2 Low Complexity Enhancement Video Codec (LCEVC) came to life. Instead of being an entirely new video codec (“yet another codec”), LCEVC is a new tool to bridge the gap to any subsequent generation of codecs. More specifically, LCEVC is a codec-agnostic and low-complexity capability extension for video codecs. The concept is simple: LCEVC combines with in such a way that the combination of the two achieves a generational step-change in compression efficiency without any increase (and in most cases with a decrease) in encoding or decoding complexity. What’s more, LCEVC can be decoded via light software processing, and even via HTML5, meaning that the vast majority of devices on the planet can immediately deliver next-generation video experiences to all consumers, at equal or lower costs. As soon as the next generation codecs become deployable, LCEVC can enhance their performance and reduce their computational complexity, effectively enhancing their business case. This presentation will include real performance data and comprehensive benchmarks for live and VoD streaming, illustrating the compression quality and encoding complexity benefits achievable with MPEG-5 Part 2 LCEVC as an enhancement to AVC/h.264, HEVC and AV1. The implications for video developers will be discussed in terms of how a video encoding, delivery and player pipeline can be updated, along with the broader business benefits that the industry should expect. Presented at Demuxed 2019 in San Francisco.