What do the three entities of the title have to do together? The second entity is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy,  the tale of an organisation, actually more than one, established by Hari Seldon, who had invented psychohistory. According to that fictional theory the responses of large human populations to certain stimuli will remain the same over time if conditions remain as planned. Then, according to Asimov, psychohistory can predict the main elements of the evolution of society over the centuries…

Introduction I am very proud of the high scientific level of the work that MPEG does with its standards. I think that many universities would enhance the value and effectiveness of the education they provide if they took an MPEG standard, not necessarily a successful one, and have students redo the same process that led MPEG to develop that standard. Because of their high scientific value so many MPEG standards have been wildly successful, as The impact of MPEG standards…

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…