[peutetre]

> What incentive is there for companies like InterDigital, Ericsson, Nokia, or even Qualcomm to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on each generation of codecs?

If there's no incentive then they are the wrong companies to do the work.

Google, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, etc. all derive clear and direct benefits from video codec improvements. They have strong incentives to reduce the bandwidth usage and increase the image quality of internet video. That's why they've all contributed to and use AV1:

https://aomedia.org/membership/members/

All protocols and formats on the web are available to implement under royalty-free terms:

https://www.w3.org/policies/patent-policy/

Audio and video are no different. If H.265 can't meet that standard then it's the wrong choice for the web.

AV1 for video and Opus for audio are formats that achieve royalty-free licensing and are better fits for the web and the internet generally.