- Are you or have you been an MPEG member?
Although I am not an engineer and have never been an MPEG member or worked for one, I have been a big fan since learning about MPEG in the middle 1990s - What do you think makes MPEG special?
I have always been impressed by what interoperable standards make possible and with MPEG in particular, I have seen the streaming revolution born from MPEG - What do you think is the most important MPEG impact?
While arguably its most important impact has been for video and audio, since the early days of VRML and MPEG-4 I believe MPEG has also stood for what interoperability can enable. - Do you think MPEG is a good conduit for research?
As a conduit for research, I was especially interested in MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 as they developed. - Can you comment on your MPEG experience?
Since May 2016, I’ve had the pleasure of writing short news stories about different MPEG technologies, under appropriate supervision of course, since I myself am neither an engineer nor an expert. This is particularly interesting, as I learn about each one, because each is both an interesting conduit for research as well as an area where interoperability could bring greater advantages. As a writer, my particular problem with MPEG coverage has been its inaccuracy and so it is especially a privilege to create digestible write-ups that do not suffer from inaccuracy, thanks again to the supervision my pieces receive. My experience with MPEG has been that I enjoy continuing to learn. - Are you satisfied with MPEG standards?
I cannot assess whether I am satisfied with MPEG’s standards, especially because it seems to me that a lot more adoption would bring benefits that made the technical standards themselves even more satisfactory, And they almost all are extensible, so I think greater adoption would improve the quality of MPEG’s outputs. - Do you think MPEG standards are the right choice?
This gets back to the issue of who wants their digital assets to work together with whoever else’s digital assets. If the world wanted better solutions, for example for privacy, MPEG has made such standards available for years. Perhaps members of the lay public choose assertively to remain uninformed/ignorant of prospective solutions that could be implemented in the near term. Perhaps business as well choose to sometimes comply with industry efforts to make an area interoperable while those very same companies remain aprt, separated by technological walled gardens from their competitors. - What do you expect from MPEG in the future?
What I expect from MPEG in the future is that it will continue to stand for a flexible, constructive extensible and interoperable way of doing things that need to be accomplished in the digital world. While malls house commerce and the MPEG-4 virtual mall did not come to fruition as a digitally built space to shop in, MPEG has many other dreams that did come true. MPEG also served as a forum for discussions between professionals in common research areas that have since been productized, such as user-avatar synchronization of facial expressions. Everywhere I turn in MPEG, the applications and use cases are fascinating if not even more enthralling. Conventionally they include media that can exist in one memory location or else be accessed on the fly with various gradations of performance and bandwith needed to fit within different profiles. When companies and researchers agree that it is time to work together, interoperably, I believe MPEG will continue to be a fair and objective conduit for research to result in enormous public benefits, thanks to well spec-ed profiles. I would like to see policymakers be more cognizant of such opportunities.
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