Introduction I have seen people ask the question: MPEG makes many very successful standard but many are not widely used. Why do you make so many standards? I know they ask this question because they dare not ask this other question “Why don’t you make just the good standards?”. They do not do it because they know that the easy answer would be the famous phrase attributed to John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the…

Introduction Obviously, the electrical representation of sound information happened before the electrical representation of visual information and so did the services that used that representation to distribute sound information. The digital representation of audio, too, happened at different times than video's. In the early 1980s the Compact Disc (CD) allowed record companies to distribute digital audio for the consumer market, while the D1 digital tape, available in the late 1980’s, was for the exclusive use of professional applications such as…

So far MPEG has developed, is completing or is planning to develop 22 standards for a total of 201 specifications. For those not in MPEG, and even for some active in MPEG, there is natural question: what is the purpose of all these standards? Assuming that the answer to this question is given, a second one pops up: is there a logic in all these MPEG standards? Depending on the amount of understanding of the MPEG phenomenon, you can receive…

Introduction For about 150 years, the telephone service has provided a socially important communication means to billions of people. For at least a century the telecom industry wanted to offer a more complete user experience (as we would call it today) by adding the visual to the speech component. Probably the first large scale attempt at offering such an audio-visual service was AT&T’s PicturePhone in the mid 1960's. The service was eventually discontinued but the idea of expanding the telephone…

Introduction An ecosystem is composed of elements variously interconnected and variously dependent on one another. Standardisation is a particular type of ecosystem. Purpose of this article is to analyse the elements of the MPEG ecosystem and their relationships. Standardisation in the past In days long bygone, standardisation in what today we would call the “media industry” followed a rather simple process. A company wishing to attach a “standard” label to a product that had become successful in the market made…

There are people who do not like MPEG (I wonder why), but so far I have not found anybody disputing the success of MPEG. Some people claim that only a few MPEG standards are successful, but maybe that is because some MPEG standards are_so_ successful. In this article the reasons of MPEG success are identified and analysed by using the 18 elements of the figure below. A standard for all. In the late 1980's many industries, regions and countries had…