MPEG's fifth steps

 Last update: 2008/06/11

After the memorable achievement of the PD 1.0 specification, I tried hard to convince SDMI that the body should work on developing interoperable specifications that included specific technologies beyond the screening ones, or the entire initiative would bemeaningless. My efforts were in vain and, at the Los Angeles meeting at the beginning of 7th July 1999, the very meeting that approved PD 1.0, one after the other, representatives of the different industry constituencies expressed their hostility to my proposal. 

That was a rough awakening. Maybe thinking that representatives of large media and technology companies would work together to create a practical alternative to MP3 had been a naïve mistake on my part, but that was not a time for recrimination. It was clear to me that SDMI would remain an important milestone in the transition of media from analogue to digital but, unless its membership changed their mind, SDMI would at most be remembered as a precursor of the transition, not as the organisation that would actually manage it to create the bright new world. The SDMI route was no longer available, but I still wanted to create the new world.

I had a very intense summer holidays in 1999 and I will try to go back over the steps that ked me to a formulation of a new strategy.

Throughout all of history artists have always endured a constant tension between their capability of expressing art and their ability to satisfy two basic desires: first to be recognised as an artist and second to be remunerated, not necessarily in this order. Middlemen have always found a role propping up both desires of artists and they and their proxies have invented all sort of ways to promote artists and all sort of technologies to create, promote, deliver and consume their creations. All this has provided practical answers to the artists' tension, but has at the same time rendered the artists more and more dependent on the middlemen. 

With the arrival of digital technologies and the Internet, people at first thought that creation, distribution and consumption of content would become radically easier, Soon, however, they discovered that their thoughts were hollow because digital technologies simply allowed the transformation of a piece of art into bits that were easier to distribute, but did not help solve any of the other problems, certainly not their remuneration.

The vision that I had when I agreed to be SDMI's Executive Director was to empower anybody in the value chain and give him the possibility to talk to the owners of some other bits representing content that was interesting to him, negotiate and make deals with them so that he could become a legitimate "user" of those bits. Depending on the conditions of usage, the person could add something valuable to the bits whose rights to use he had just acquired and make something new, hopefully, more valuable than the individual constituent parts. 

I wanted to make this process possible for all players in the value chain and let this "bit partnership" extend without limits. The more people could add bits, the more valuable the bit combination would potentially become. I did expect that the more complex the network of "rights to the bits" became, so would become the technologies making this possible. 

This idea of value chain users adding value is of course not new. If you replace the word "bit" with "content" all that I have said above has happened for centuries if not millennia and evolved in ways that were originally not codified. But what could be done in the physical world is just a very small part of what is possible for digital technologies. 

In 1996 I first had the idea of experimenting with the creation of a marketplace of digital AV content for professional users. The CEC-funded ACTS ATMAN project was driven by the idea that, with the increasing number of content offerings that SPs would make over the multiplying number of delivery systems, there would be need of more efficient means for them to acquire and stock up content than had been available with analogue content. The purpose of ATMAN was then to define mechanisms to trade digital audio-visual material, develop and integrate hardware and software subsystems in support of the trading mechanisms so defined and test the full supply/handling/delivery chain by getting the involvement of real users. 

The following figure was taken by the project as a reference for its work. 

The ATMAN model

Content possibly created in remote places, say by a news gathering team, would be uploaded on the ATMAN server via satellite (or, possibly, the fixed network) and the corresponding descriptions uploaded on the ATMAN database. Prospective buyers would search the latter for interesting descriptions and preview pieces of content stored in the former. If the content, its terms of use and the price were found interesting, a transaction would occur. Note that in 1996-97 ATM was still considered a technology companies would make plans on for new developments. In the ATMAN case ATM would be used for the upload and delivery of AV content while IP would be used to search in the ATMAN database of available content.

The thoughts of my 1999 summer holidays built on both the SDMI and ATMAN experience. The opportunity to present them was offered by the WIPO International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Intellectual Property in September 1999. Then came the MPEG meeting in Melbourne in October where I presented my thoughts in a set of slides to the membership. The message was basically an extension of the ATMAN idea but with two constraints removed. The first was that the trading should not just apply to the CP-SP relationship and the second was that all types of digital content, not just AV, should be supported.

The slogan that I coined at that time was to create a future where 6 billion humans were to be enabled to take on the multiple roles that exist on the value chain: content provider, value adder, packager, service provider, consumer, reseller, etc. and that an infrastructure enabling electronic commerce of digital content was needed to enable such future. To make my message concrete, my slides advocated the need to create a "big picture" and make an inventory of the technologies underpinning the life cycle of media in the new digital environment. 

The big picture would be used to create a "Multimedia Framework" where the different technologies would find a place. In the framework one would see which technologies already existed and which were missing. The latter would be developed by MPEG, if it had the necessary expertise. Otherwise, an appropriate competent body would be found and convinced to develop the missing technology. Lastly, and very much in line with its tradition, MPEG would attempt to integrate the technologies into a coherent whole. My presentation also suggested a name for this project: MPEG-21, from the century that was soon to begin. 

The proposal was well received and Keith Hill, then with MCPS, the UK organisation in charge of music licensing, a long time participant in MPEG and an active participant in SDMI where he was chairing at that time the Functional Requirements (FR) WG, took over the important task of converting my general ideas into a practical proposition. At the following Maui, HI meeting in December, MPEG was already in a position to ask SC 29 to approve the proposal of a new project. The plan was to have a Technical Report describing the Multimedia Framework as Part 1, followed by a number of other Parts with normative value. 

A workshop was organised at the following March 2000 meeting in Noordwijkerout. The goal was to promote the project with a comprehensive overview of the different issues and players. Several speakers from MPEG gave their views and other organisations were invited to contribute to the definition of the scope. News of the approval of the project by JTC1 came during the June 2000 meeting in Geneva and the formal work started on that occasion. I also sounded out Keith Brannon of ITTF, my usual interface with ISO, whether it was possible to get a "good-looking" 5-digit number for MPEG-21. To my surprise it turned out that ISO/IEC 21000 was "free" and could be allocated to MPEG-21. 

At the basis of MPEG-21 there is the notion of Digital Item (DI), defined as a structured digital object with a standard representation, identification and metadata. A typical example of a DI could be a music compilation containing the music files, photos of the singers and performers, videos of the best concerts, animated graphics, lyrics, scores and MIDI files. These can be described as "static" components of the DI, but there could be "dynamic", i.e. time-dependent components as well, such as interviews with the singers, statements by opinion makers, ratings of an agency, position in the hit lists, etc. The DI, to be able to express its value fully, would contain navigational information driven by user preferences. 

The DI is the basic unit of transaction between two parties. Depending on the conditions of purchase, rights to the "music compilation" DI might mean to be able to access up to 2 interviews for the next 2 months, while statements, ratings and positions could be made free for the next 15 days and cost a fixed amount of money thereafter. News related to the song, such as bargains - another dynamic component - could be provided for the next 6 months. 

In MPEG-21 "User" is any entity that interacts in the MPEG-21 environment or acts upon a DI. User is, by no means, not just the "end-user". This "User" can be anybody performing such roles of acting on content to create, provide, archive, rate, enhance, aggregate, deliver, syndicate, (retail) sell, consume, subscribe, regulate and many more… 

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