If MPEG were a typical company, the answer to this question would be simple. Persons in charge of different levels of the organisation “decide”. But MPEG is not a company and there is no chain of command where A tells B to do C or else. Decisions are made, but how? As an autocracy, an oligarchy or a democracy? To answer these questions, let’s first see how the work in MPEG is organised. The convenor chairs the 3 plenary sessions.…

The question looks innocent enough. A video is a sequence of images (called frames) captured and eventually displayed at a given frequency. However, by stopping at a specific frame of the sequence, a single video frame, i.e. an image, is obtained. If we talk of a sequence of video frames, that would always be true. It would also be true if an image compression algorithm (an “intra-frame” coding system) is applied to each individual frame. Such coding system may not…

Introduction A group of MPEG and JPEG members have developed a proposal seek to leverage the impact MPEG and JPEG standards have had on thousands of companies and billions of people all over the world. A few numbers related to 2018 tell a long story. At the device level, the installed base of MPEG-enabled devices was worth 2.8 trillion USD and the value of devices in that year was in excess of 1 trillion USD. At the service level, the…

The hurdles of standardisation today Making standards is not like any other tasks. In most cases it is technical in nature because it is about agreeing on and documenting how certain things should be done to claim to be conforming to the standard. Standards can be developed unilaterally by someone powerful enough to tell other people how they should do things. More often, however, standards are developed collaboratively by people who share an interest in a standard, i.e. in enabling…

Introduction In the parable of the Talents the Gospel tells the story of a master who entrusts 5 talents (a large amount of money at that time) to one servant and 2 talents to another before leaving for a long travel. The first servant works hard and doubles his talents, while the second plays safe and buries the talents. When the master returns, he awards the first servant and punishes the second. Thirty-one years ago, MPEG was given the field…

Introduction Some could think that the title is an oxymoron. Indeed standards, certainly international ones, are published by not-for-profit organisations. How could they have a business model? The answer is that around a standard there are quite a few entities, some of which are far from being not-for-profit. Therefore, this article intends to analyse how business models can influence standards. The actors of standardisation Let’s first have a look at the actors of standardisation. The first actor is the organisation…