- Are you or have you been an MPEG member?
I have been representing for several years the European Broadcasting Union, which is cooperating closely with the ISO and with full access to MPEG activities. - What do you think makes MPEG special?
MPEG is a well established and recognised international community of experts from key sectors of the industry and also the academic world. - What do you think is the most important MPEG impact?
From the perspective of the broadcasting industry, MPEG has standardised technologies essential to our activities such as audio and video coding, metadata, DASH, rights management, etc. - Do you think MPEG is a good conduit for research?
MPEG does foster innovation with a strong academic participation. This has been definitely reinforced by the recognition of its activities by organisation like the European Commission. Many projects have been financed which included to various extent a participation in the standardisation effort as well as the evaluation and implementation of ISO MPEG standards. Similar effects most likely affected other non-European regions. - Can you comment on your MPEG experience?
The positive part of this experience was the time I spent in MPEG learning and sharing expertise with top-notch experts attending these meetings. It is better having a clear and well defined objectives as following MPEG activities can rapidly become overwhelming. However, the organisation of the meetings with general sessions during which progress is summarised helps considerably.
The negative part had to do with being the witness of lobbying in favour of particular solutions or undermining others going against particular interests. Seasoned MPEG participants would expertly play their partition during sub-group meetings, or in preparation of such meetings, to prepare non-experts to support their position. The last example I remember was discussions around open source and license-free encoders. Probably unavoidable but sometimes unbearable. - Are you happy with MPEG standards?
From a technological perspective MPEG standards have a high value and lead to products commonly used on the market, including in the broadcasting industry. From a commercial perspective, on could argue that some MPEG standards favour the monopoly position of certain patent holders, which probably leads to some market distortion when defining licensing policies. But of course, this is not proper to this organisation and occurs in many other similar efforts. - Do you think MPEG standards are the right choice?
Yes, absolutely when it comes to the core business of MPEG: coding, metadata, rights management, DASH, etc. (again from my broadcasting perspective) - What do you expect from MPEG in the future?
I have noticed the recent effort on new activities around neural networks. Whether MPEG is the place to work on this or not, only the future will say. But globally speaking, it is clear that considering emerging (in the sense of having reached some market potential) technologies is the way to go provided the community evolves and new brains join the effort.
Skip to content