The Impact of MPEG-7

 Last update: 2005/03/08

Metadata are an important ingredient for any business strategy in the media field, both at the industry and company level. At the industry level this can be seen from the large number of initiatives that have developed or are still in the process of developing metadata standards.  At the company level this can be seen from the attempt of many pay TV SPs to offer access to their content through proprietary Electronic Program Guide (EPG) technologies. The other main application domain, streaming video on the Internet, is still struggling to show people investing in it that meaningful business models exist and such sophistications as metadata get second priority.

This explains why there are few significant cases of MPEG-7 use in the marketplace yet. The pay TV model forces every provider to make all investments that are needed for an effective access to AV information. As a result every SP has very primitive forms of content access. There is little money flowing behind distribution over the Internet and no significant service-level innovation is taking place. On the other hand, it is true that, in spite of the confusion surrounding the word "convergence", more content reaches the end users through multiple channels, each of which used to be controlled by a single industry. CPs who will want to exploit multichannel distribution opportunities for their content will need metadata that are truly generic, and there is no other metadata standard but MPEG-7 with this feature.

This is the type of effort that is currently being made to align the metadata jointly developed by the Pro-MPEG Forum and the AAF Association under the name Material eXchange Format (MXF) and MPEG-7.

Another organisation with which MPEG has started dealing with in the latest phases of MPEG-7 is the TV Anytime Forum (TVA). TVA is one splinter group of the latter-day DAVIC work, when the management of that body had proposed the continuation of DAVIC beyond the 5-year date with a program of work centred on two projects: "TV Anytime" and "TV Anywhere". The membership did not support the continuation of DAVIC but the idea of "TV Anytime" continued as a loose organisation of interested companies. The original idea of TV Anytime was one of a TV receiving device, like some products currently available, that has storage capacity and therefore could extend the use of the broadcasting channel by letting the receiver "pick" programs of interest to the user when they are actually transmitted and then the user could watch those programs when he had time for it. TVA is adopting some of the MPEG-7 technologies for its specifications.

At the completion of version 1 of MPEG-7 in July 2001 there was talk of setting up an MPEG-7 Alliance (MP7A), an organisation with a scope similar to M4IF. Recently it has been found more convenient to extend the scope of M4IF to host MPEG-7 related interests. The proposal has been accepted at the June 2003 M4IF General Assembly. The new name of M4IF is MPEGIF with the goal to cater for the needs of the MPEG-4, MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 industry communities.

Recently Via Licensing, an organisation aiming to support technology licensing, has issued a Call for Essential Patents for the MPEG-7 standard. This will hopefully lead to the establishment of a patent pool that will help kickstart an MPEG-7 industry.

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