Thanks for this update.
I am reminded of a famous slogan for a branch of the U.S. military:
“Join the Navy, see the world.”
I spent several years participating in the MPEG process after MPEG-2 was
created, and had my eyes opened to how it worked. I had the pleasure of
working with Leonardo during those years and respected his ability to manage
the process, such as it was.
It was an amazing sight to sit in a plenary with hundreds of engineers from
most of the major players in the Information technology and television
Industries. I wondered aloud why there were so many people attending the MPEG
meetings, yet only a handful of them actually did anything meaningful in terms
of developing MPEG standards.
The answer was simple, and disturbing: to get intellectual property from their
companies Into the standards so the companies could participate in the royalty
pools.
And there was another motivation. Attending these meetings, held in major
cities and resorts all over the world, was a form of compensation for the
engineers participating. I remember having dinner with Leonardo during an MPEG
meeting in Maui.
That being said, MPEG was a highly political process. Leonardo enjoyed a
special relationship with the key players having spent time working in Japan,
learning the language and the culture.
The first standard, MPEG-1 helped to tune the process, but was largely ignored
by the television industry. It saw limited adoption with interactive CD-ROMs,
which were an attempt to replace interactive applications delivered via
Laserdisc.
When work began on MPEG-2 the television industry took notice - especially the
Japanese companies pushing HDTV. When General Instruments demonstrated the
video compression technology they were developing for Direct Broadcast
Satellite, MPEG-2 became the home of efforts to control the compression
technology for Digital Television.
Most important, however, it became the venue for companies to control the
intellectual property in the MPEG-2 standard, which then became the core of
both the ATSC and DVB standards. It is ironic that most of the core IP in
MPEG-2 had been developed decades earlier and was either in, or about to enter
the “royalty free” public domain.
The MPEG process was used to re-invent this IP for the standard, creating a
royalty pool - MPEG-LA - that enriched the participants for nearly two decades.
Sadly, it was also used to entrench an archaic analog compression technique -
iNtErLaCe - into MPEG-2.
We still live with this sad legacy, with many areas of the world still using
interlaced SDTV/HDTV today; ATSC, DVB, and millions of cable boxes.
My involvement with MPEG was focused on creating a new “Progressive Profile”
within MPEG-2. I was starting to get some traction, until my consulting
agreement with the company that provided the financial backing to participate
in the very expensive MPEG process was terminated. To this day I still am
subscribed to MPEG e-mail reflectors, thus I have seen what Leonardo and
company have been up to for the past two decades.
The reality is that MPEG developed many standards, most of which have not
enjoyed any commercial success. But the engineers do enjoy the paid vacations...
Things changed dramatically when the ITU decided it needed to work on video
compression technology. The ITU was working on what eventually became the h-264
standard. Many of the companies working with the ITU were concerned about the
royalty model behind MPEG-2 and the role of MPEG-LA to collect royalties.
MPEG-2 was largely ignored by the computer industry because of the licensing
terms; the one exception was its use in DVDs, which were a huge new product
area for the traditional video equipment vendors, but a limited success in
“Multimedia PCs.”
Pressure was applied and Leonardo was forced to “collaborate” with the ITU on
what became the h-264/MPEG-4 standard. More important, the royalty rules for
MPEG-4 made it affordable for companies like Apple and Microsoft to provide
mass support for the standard, which in turn enabled what has become the video
streaming market.
The same collaborative agreement has led to the HVEC - h.265 standard, although
it is less than clear how well this standard will be supported. As has been
pointed out, most of the major players have moved their support to efforts to
develop royalty free standards, which in turn has allowed Leonardo to retire.
Just to put into perspective how far we have come, when MPEG-2 decoders were
first being designed there was huge concern about the cost of the memory chips
needed for the decoder - I believe it was 8 MBytes. This was a major factor in
the MPEG-2
Main Profile@Main Level limitation of 10.4 million samples per second, which
precluded the desirable (16:9) 854 x 480 progressive format. 640 x 480 @ 60P
was included in MP@ML and the ATSC standard but rarely if ever used.
Today most phones have at least 64 GB of memory and capture progressive scan 4K
HDTV at up to 60 FPS.
Regards
Craig
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