I have been interviewed by the Chinese webzine LiveVideoStack. The questions were smart and gave me the opportunity to make my views known. Here is an extract of the questions on MPEG and of my answers. The full interview is here. LiveVideoStack: Your new book Even the stars die: The history of MPEG and how it made digital media happen has been published this summer, congratulations! Could you tell us what inspired you to write it? Leonardo: There is no…

People who look back at the MPEG-2 times as the golden age of video compression licensing have a point. For 20 years the ownership of an MPEG-2 Video and Systems patent was a licence to print money – just ask people in the industry. What those people don’t consider, however, is that the MPEG-2 licensing was not the first case of the new video compression licensing but the last case of the old consumer electronics licensing – just look at…

Toward the end of the 1980’s, the television industry went crazy with digital TV: Among service providers you had the full spectrum of feelings: people yearning for it (satellite TV, cable TV and telecom), people exploiting it for different purposes (some terrestrial broadcasters), people fearing it (other terrestrial broadcasters) and people hating it (still other terrestrial broadcasters). Among manufacturers, the general feeling was of love (new markets and/or new products added to/replacing old products) mixed with fear (a competitor’s format winning the competition).…