I'm not getting most of this. MPEG outlived its usefulness, when you have
companies willing to collaborate, to make new codecs they develop, available
royalty-free. Existing uses of MPEG will soldier on, but new video standards,
like 4K and 8K, will prefer to use the royalty-free options.
The only issue that matters, ultimately, should be interoperability.
Chiariglione blames the ISO. I'm not sure why anyone should be to blame. The
ISO may be trying to figure out patent pools and such, but nothing will beat
companies that agree on their own. Much as, ISO also lost out to the IETF, in
matters of networking protocols, because the IETF was easier for the
participants to work with, and to deploy real products.
If the major influential companies can agree on a home-grown standard of their
own, and make it available royalty-free for others wanting to produce content
in that video format, why is there a need to blame anyone? In effect, this also
describes how the IETF operated and operates.
At the bottom, this article provides a link to Chiariglione's actual blog. But
the blog didn’t much clarify matters for me, anyway.
In 1994, MPEG 2-TS and MPEG-2 compression were the only games in town, to fit
HDTV into a 6 MHz slice of OTA broadcast spectrum, and to ensure the broadcast
stream could be decoded synchronously. But technology evolves, and agreements
evolve. Streaming, and new broadcast protocols, do not depend exclusively on
MPEG-2 TS anymore, nor are they dependent on old codecs. Eh?
Bert
----------------------------------------------------
https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/mpeg-founder-declares-death-of-standard
Home News Regulatory and Standards
MPEG Founder Declares ‘Death’ of Standard
By Tom Butts 3 days ago
Places a lot of blame on how the industry handled HEVC
The founder of the most widely used digital video standard of the 20th century
says the group that developed it has closed up shop, adding that the standard
is officially “dead,” killed off by the International Organization for
Standardization, which he derided as a “feudal organization.”
Leonardo Chiariglione, founder of the Moving Pictures Experts Group, resigned
from the organization—which he had led since founding the group in 1988—in June
and made his thoughts known in a blog titled “A Future Without MPEG” last week.
Among the reasons, Chiariglione cited was the way the ISO changed its methods
in treating the standard, which is responsible for the widespread adoption of
digital video over the past several decades.
“What used to be the reference standards group driving close to 2% of the Gross
World Product, i.e. $1.5 trillion, and affecting the daily lives of billions of
people is now reduced to splinters” he said. “The radical innovation of putting
in one committee all media components, copied by most standards bodies and
companies, is gone. Now, ISO media standards are treated separately. Godspeed,
when someone will need to put the pieces together.”
This doesn’t mean that MPEG no longer works, but rather further development of
the standard is effectively dead.
Chiariglione says that while holders of MPEG-2 IP (which became the de facto
digital video standard for DTV worldwide) were “responsible” industry
participants, holders of patents for succeeding standards—particularly
HEVC—were not.
“MPEG did not live happily after MPEG-2 because it saw that most MPEG-2 IP
holders held IP on the following (video) coding standards and had difficulty
adjusting to the internet video distribution paradigm,” he said. “Adding to
that, the number of IP holders on HEVC has skyrocketed to ~45, 2/3 of which
belong to one of the three existing patent pools and 1/3 belong to none.
“It should be no surprise that the HEVC standard has some use in broadcasting,
but its use on the web is estimated to be at 12%,” he continued. “If one
considers that broadcasting is a rich but declining market and video on the web
is constantly rising, one understands that ISO standards will be gradually
relegated to a more and more marginal market.”
Chiariglione added that efforts to evolve the licensing regime to a “royalty
free” arrangement based on various flavors of MPEG standards following MPEG-2
came up short, again blaming the ISO.
“A company should not be forced to give away a patent for free, but ... ISO
rules allow a company to prevent a no-license/free license standard from
happening by simply making a cautionary ‘I may have patents that I am willing
to license’ declaration,” he said.
Chiariglione also cites the new landscape that has taken hold over the past
decade with new proprietary video codecs developed by Silicon Valley, like AV1,
which was developed by Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and
Netflix as part of the “Alliance for Open Media.”
When it announced the AV1 standard in 2015, AOM said that AV1 would have a
royalty-free ecosystem; patent review process and legal defense fund; cutting
edge technologies and collaborative open source development, Chiariglione said.
While he described MPEG-4 AVC as a very successful “generic” standard because
it is used for broadcasting and online streaming as well, he had harsh words
for HEVC.
“After seven years, MPEG-H HEVC patent holders could not get their acts
together and propose a decently unified licence,” he said. “HEVC is used in
broadcasting, however, use for streaming is limited at best.”
He says the death of MPEG was inevitable partly because of the influx of
competing standards from computer interests.
“MPEG, with all its influence on the industry, was like a free city in the
Middle Ages, ready to fall under the attack of powerful armies,” he said.
As for the future, he has hope for the recently adopted VVC standard, “if they
get their act together and propose a decent licensing scheme,” but he fears
that broken industry promises and ISO policies will bog things down.
His blog is available here: https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-future-without-mpeg/
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