Short and sweet...
Leonardo was a “creature” of the world broadcast TV industry and the
manufacturers that supported broadcasters. That industry is dying, and MPEG
along with it.
The “ pandemic” has clearly illuminated the reality that the computer industry
now provides the technology to allow anyone, anywhere, to connect with anyone,
anywhere, anytime, even broadcasters hiding in their basements...
Regards
Craig
On Jul 13, 2020, at 12:04 AM, Manfredi (US), Albert E
<albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:
- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at
FreeLists.org
- By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word
unsubscribe in the subject line.