Introduction The publication of A vision made real – Past, present and future of MPEG has triggered many reactions coming from people in other industries. They are facing the same problem that MPEG started facing 31 years ago when it wanted to create digital media standards that were industry-agnostic and with a global scope. My answer to this people has been that, indeed, the MPEG model can be exported to other domains where industries with different backgrounds, technologies, stakes and…

Introduction The title of this article contains three elements: the verb own pre- and postfixed with a quotation mark which conveys the notion of having “a control of, a stake in or an influence on”; the acronym MPEG with its multiple meanings; and the pronoun who which represents several entities. In this article I will try and clarify the nature of these three elements and draw some conclusions that may be useful for some impending decisions. The different uses of…

Introduction For three decades MPEG has designed multi-threaded work programs, cooperated with tens of organisations and developed close to 200 specifications and hundreds of amendments. MPEG standards have transformed the global media industry from analogue to digital, enabled participation of new industries in the media business, provided standards serving all industries without favours and ensured unrelenting expansion of the entire media business. MPEG achievements look reassuring: in 2018 the global turnover of MPEG-enabled devices is worth more than 1 trillion…

Introduction In July 1987 the plan to create a group that would develop industry-neutral standards was formed. But problem to be tackled was that the MPEG “digital baseband” (see The discontinuity of digital technologies) had to based on international international standards because they had to have global validity. The question then was: where should those standards be developed? The answer is provided by the following sections: Standards describes the 3 international standards organisations; ISO and IEC standards describes the ISO structure and…

Introduction Last week I published as an article of this blog the Executive summary of my book A vision made real – Past, present and future of MPEG. This time I publish as an article the first chapter of the book about the four aspects of the media distribution business and their enabling tech­nologies: Analogue media distribution describes the vertical businesses of analogue media distribution; Digitised media describes media digitisation and why it was largely irrelevant to distribution; Compressed digital media describes how industry tried…

Why this book? In a generation, life of the large majority of human beings is incredibly different than the life of the generation before. The ability to  communicate made possible by ubiquitous internet and to convey media content to others made possible by MPEG standards can probably be mentioned among the most important factors of change. However, unlike internet about which a lot has been written, little is known about the MPEG group besides its name. This book wants to…