The Impact of MPEG-4

 Last update: 2005/03/08

At the MPEG Vancouver meeting in July 1999 it was realised that, while interest in MPEG-4 remained high and diffuse, there was no industry or company that was willing to take on the role that Cable Labs had taken for MPEG-2. It was then found necessary to make another step to help kickstart MPEG-4 adoption in the marketplace. Rob Koenen, the Requirements Chair, took the task on himself and, starting from a brainstorming session at the Vancouver meeting, he led the discussions among interested people that eventually led to the establishment of the MPEG-4 Industry Forum (M4IF), again c/o M^e Jacquemmoud in Geneva in May 2000 with the goal

to further the adoption of the MPEG-4 Standard, by establishing MPEG-4 as an accepted and widely used standard among application developers, service providers, content creators and end users.

I was one of those signing the statutes (the others were Rob Koenen and Takuyo Kogure), but decided that this time I would be just a supporter of the initiative from the outside.

At the Maui, HI meeting, the Saturday after the MPEG meeting in December 1999, M4IF kicked off the activity that eventually led to the licensing of MPEG-4 Video, Systems and Audio (in the order of publication). Working Groups were set up to discuss how an effective licensing environment could be created. At the Amsterdam meeting in March 2000, the Saturday after the MPEG meeting in Noordwijkerhout, the M4IF Statutes were approved (an adaptation of the DAVIC Statutes) and an announcement was issued that a patent pool would be initiated, inviting those who believed they held essential patents to submit their claims to an evaluator. At the July 2000 meeting in Newark, work on self certification and M4IF Logo procedures was initiated. At the Paris meeting in October the first discussions on interoperability tests between products were made. Today M4IF has over 100 members.

While MPEG-4 was being developed, the world was living through one of its greatest - and bloodless - revolutions. The ability to send email and post HTML pages triggered the demand for ever-increasing transmission bitrates made possible by new modems or ISDN or, more recently, ADSL and Cable Modem. When the bitrate began to reach a few tens of kbit/s, it began possible to start offering some audio and video in streaming mode, albeit with a reduced picture size. Some of the companies that first tried this have created a strong brand. At the end of 2000 a new industry consortium called Internet Streaming Media Association (ISMA) was established wth the goal

to accelerate the adoption of open standards for streaming rich media - video, audio, and associated data - over the Internet.

Major industry players are members of this consortium. The frrst specfication uses MPEG-4 Video Simple Profile (SP) and Advanced Simple Profile (ASP) and MPEG-4 AAC + CELP. A new specification is beng developed that uses part of the MPEG-4 IPMP infrastructure and provides an answer to those lookng for a standard-based soluton for streaming protected content. Another soluton also under development is "Advanced Content", that is likely to use the more sophisticated MPEG-4 Systems tools for scene composition.

In the meantime the mobile telco industry was getting ready for a major overhaul of the service offer that was to be based on what they called Third Generation (3G) mobile. An international consortium called 3rd Generation Partnership Program (3GPP) was established that developed all the specifications needed. More recently a parallel group called 3GPP-2 has been established with a similar objective. This is another major environment that is making use of MPEG-4 technologies, specifically Video and File Format. Actually, use of those specifications is not just restricted to 3G - whose mass deployment may still be some time away - but can be extended to 2.5 G as well, i.e. the kind of intermediate data communication environment on mobile networks like General Packet Radio Services (GPRS) whose highest-profile multimedia service is called Multimedia Message Service (MMS).

MPEG-4 products are widely available. The web environment provides a major example of mass usage of the MPEG-4 standard. A company, started by two students, has developed effective MPEG-4 Visual encoders and decoders that can be freely downloaded from the web. Originally MPEG-4 Visual SP was used, but the search for more efficient coding had led to the addition of support for ASP. Healthy competition has started as more companies are providing different encoders all competing in quality. Audio is usually MP3. Other products are 3G cellphones, allowing mobile person-to-person videocommunication with the capability to download and play or stream MPEG-4 video, and 2.5 G cellphones with MMS capability. An extension of MPEG-4 AAC is used in two digital radio services, XM and Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) that are different from DAB. There are several CE devices on sale offering MPEG-4 capabilities. Several silicon suppliers offer MPEG-4 Video encoder and decoder chips.

A list of MPEG-4 products offered by M4IF members is provided at http://www.m4if.org/products/.

Copyright © 2003 chiariglione.org