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- Are you or have you been an MPEG member?
YES
- What do you think makes MPEG special?
The breadth of coverage in multimedia
- What do you think is the most important MPEG impact?
First digital moving picture compression standard families
- Do you think MPEG is a good conduit for research?
To anticipate relevant problems
- Can you comment on your MPEG experience?
Great set of people to interact with
- Are you happy with MPEG standards?
To a certain extent, MPEG strengths are also part of its weaknesses: Many standards failed from being successful since the standard objectives had not reached the expected level of maturity for an optimal selection of the technologies and their widespread understanding to promote later the standard deployment. Thus too few players looked into too many problems. MPEG sometimes also refrained from supporting change of paradigms (for relatively short-sighted commercial reasons or “easy” return upon limited investment)
- Do you think MPEG standards are the right choice?
In some domains they have proven so
- What do you expect from MPEG in the future?
More thinking before undertaking a fast track to reach IS.
- Are you or have you been an MPEG member?
yes, for more than 12 years now
- What do you think makes MPEG special?
A rigorous working process refined during 30 years, clear rules valid for everyone where the small company (or individual) counts as the large company. It is result-driven and only the best technology is selected for inclusion in the standards. An unmatched opportunity to meet professional from all over the world and share knowledge and experience.
- What do you think is the most important MPEG impact?
Creation of entirely new ecosystems of interoperable devices and applications. It created brand new markets with the related companies and jobs.
- Do you think MPEG is a good conduit for research?
Yes, it is a well respected brand which always helped when asking for research grants in digital media processing. The opportunity to participate to MPEG activities and share knowledge with a large range of experts has given the opportunity to many to advance in research and development in the fiend of digital media processing. It’s a great opportunity to meet other researchers and share knowledge, it helps enlarging one’s network to build new consortia and research groups.
- Can you comment on your MPEG experience?
It’s a unique working and human experience. The working process helps in being very productive during and between MPEG meetings. I had the chance to work with experts from all over the world and learnt a lot from both a professional and human point of view.
- Are you happy with MPEG standards?
Yes very happy, I don’t know of any other professional organization in the technology field which has been so efficient and steadily successful for such a long time. MPEG standards helped creating successful businesses otherwise impossible (media broadcast and online streaming)
- Do you think MPEG standards are the right choice?
For anything which needs standardization of digital data formats for automated processing MPEG standard are the perfect choice.
- What do you expect from MPEG in the future?
To enlarge its scope to other domains than digital media where the lack of efficient digital (big) data representation for storage, transport and sharing is currently hindering progress due to lack of clear specifications of data formats.
- Are you or have you been an MPEG member?
Yes, we’re currently MPEG members
- What do you think makes MPEG special?
The ability to gather leading edge technologists from potentially competitive organizations and drive them in a collaborative effort despite different interests and political positions. This makes MPEG comparable (even though on a smaller scale) to high profile organizations such as CERN (probably the whole ISO, ITU, 3GPP, DVB… community should be considered here). As per “big science”, results are world class.
- What do you think is the most important MPEG impact?
The adoption of technologies such as MPEG2, AVC, HEVC, MP2/3, etc… speaks for itself: services and applications unconceivable 30 years ago are now commonplace on a global scale also thanks to MPEG (again, together with ITU, 3GPP, DVB, …)
- Do you think MPEG is a good conduit for research?
Yes, Indeed. The most interesting aspect is the mixed participation from industry, public bodies and academia: the sharing of efforts make “reality checking” and deployment in real products possible of many pieces of technology that, under other conditions (proprietary developments with limited investment capacity), would remain a theoretical exercise or a proof of concepts. In this sense, it can be considered a good accelerator of innovation.
- Can you comment on your MPEG experience?
Limited, from a contribution point of view but, still, very relevant at least as a means to understand the near future (developments in MPEG anticipate developments in industry of some 5 years)
- Are you happy with MPEG standards?
Partly: some are a huge success, some other reveal to be dead ends. This is probably inevitable; innovation as such is a bet on future with a good level of uncertainty. At a higher level, there might be a problem of “path dependency” that constrains activities under different aspects:
– Standardization inertia (we’ve started working on issue X and will continue apparently despite the industrial relevance of the results without any assessment on real impacts)
– Technological inertia: as an example, hybrid codecs are the MPEG’s trademark in the field of video compression: it’s true that they have been extremely successful so far and no industrial grade competitor is present in the market but it is also true that it miles easier to incrementally innovate starting from the existing building blocks than from scratch. This for sure creates a bias (e.g.: VVC software is being developed as an evolution of HEVC HM). Maybe there’s no other possibility, industry being industry and standards being standards, maybe opening the discussion might be useful in the light of point 4 above.
Market inertia in form of difficulty in involving new actors/tackling new fields
– Limited to some specific cases, we have seen specifications technologies developed somewhere else becoming a standard just by rubberstamping. A rare event that hasn’t led to any meaningful commercial success; probably stronger antibodies should be developed.
Being MPEG an ISO WG, it has to be said that the standardization workflow might/should be streamlined, especially for an improvement in the time-to-market efficiency, especially when sister bodies are much faster in issuing twin specifications.
- Do you think MPEG standards are the right choice?
We understand this question as meaning: do you think MPEG makes the right choices when deciding what to standardize? The answer in this case is yes and no. Where the track record has already been established as successful (video and audio coding), the choice is obviously right. In other cases, the “path-dependency” is more evident and brings to disputable results: choosing to standardize what is already at hand, without a wider attention to what is being done elsewhere, may lead to brilliant results without practical application (a first hand example, where we contributed directly: CDVS, finalized when Alexnet descendants where storming the field of image recognition and classification). Sometimes path-dependency translates in the impossibility to involve all the relevant actors
- What do you expect from MPEG in the future?
MPEG maintaining the lead in the development of industrial grade technologies in the field of digital multimedia despite the arrival of competing entities trying to leverage on political issues more than technical value. MPEG has been great so far in creating shared value (always point 4 above); we should also probably ask ourselves how to preserve this value.
Another important point is how to rewards innovators for their technical/economical contribution in developing and standardizing new technologies. Today, the only available reward for them is obtained through the patent system, but the patent owners of technologies that became part of the standards are not enough protected against the “free riders” that use the patented technologies avoiding to take a license for their use.
- Are you or have you been an MPEG member?
Yes, I acted as a delegate of a long term MPEG member : Telefonica, in the past.
- What do you think makes MPEG special?
MPEG appeared early (in terms of the video industry), and early is always the best moment for standardization. It gathered the right partners and gained momentum fast. Better than other industry standards MPEG had always the right balance between openness (having always interesting free profiles) and rights exploitation. It has also been a forum for patent alignment in a ‘friendly’ manner (if that is possible). All in all it has been considerably more successful than others in keeping traction with manufacturers and content creators.
- What do you think is the most important MPEG impact?
Being able to maintain an MPEG profile at the forefront of every video industry age.
- Do you think MPEG is a good conduit for research?
Among MPEG partners you will find the best video That is a first step for serious progress. Those researchers not always collaborate in a joint project inside MPEG, but they are open to discuss new directions for video research at any MPEG networking event. That openness is a serious push for research in the video industry as a whole.
- Can you comment on your MPEG experience?
I used MPEG papers in a research lab for many years (20) and even took part in meetings as a national delegate. A great experience.
- Are you satisfied with MPEG standards?
Mostly yes. The whole video compression issue got much more complex than it used to be over time, specially with MPEG 4 part 10 (H.264) and HEVC (H.265). Nowadays it is really hard to introduce significative gains in the standard without rewriting huge parts of the basic model. That is not a MPEG flaw, but probably the result of a big success in video research of which MPEG has been first actor. But, nevertheless, it gets harder to understand, comprehend, test and implement any new release of MPEG. That is the only criticism I have : it has become difficult to handle, while at the same time the industry demands improvements at the highets pace we have ever seen.
- Do you think MPEG standards are the right choice?
MPEG standards are good for the industry. Right choice?. In my view the best choice is no choice, but have all that you can do in paralell. There are interesting standards out of MPEG. Why not give them a try at the same time. When it comes to choices I would point out that MPEG consortium is a mature organization, so yes, it is a good choice if you look for a quick alignment in commercialisation and clearing out patent disputes. Others (non MPEG) may come up with something of greater merit eventually, but it is almost impossible today that a single team , not using previous patents, can create a whole end to end video system. So having the right forum, and the right organization to come to agreements is a big bonus.
- What do you expect from MPEG in the future?
I expect MPEG to just go on with good practices. I would not expect any U-turn, neither in organisation model nor in research capacity. There are challenges ahead both in terms of research investment and commercialisation model. Would MPEG be able to compete with all-for-free video schemas? I do not know the answer, but that is something that for sure must be discussed inside MPEG consortium.
- Are you or have you been an MPEG member?
Yes, I have been and am now an MPEG member.
- What do you think makes MPEG special?
The achievements what MPEG has accomplished as well as an incomparable group of experts.
- What do you think is the most important MPEG impact?
Various innovative technologies related to multimedia content systems including media coding, media transport, and so on.
- Do you think MPEG is a good conduit for research?
Yes, MPEG is surely not only an important standardization group but also a wonderful community of experts.
So it is a good place to show/study research results.
- Can you comment on your MPEG experience?
I joined MPEG meeting ten years ago, which are almost two-thirds of my researcher’s life.
I have learned a lot of things from MPEG that include researchers’ viewers more than multimedia technologies.
- Are you happy with MPEG standards?
- Do you think MPEG standards are the right choice?
- What do you expect from MPEG in the future?
The importance of digital content must increase furthermore in the future.
I expect MPEG will provide various technologies related to digital content from content creation to content consumption.
- Are you or have you been an MPEG member?
Not Directly but the team I manage was very involved
- What do you think makes MPEG special?
A worldwide standard helps a ‘technology democracy’ . You fix common rules and then you compete
- What do you think is the most important MPEG impact?
If we have tons of digital multimedia contents it is thanks to MPEG. If we have Digital TV, Digital Media industry, Smartphones…. It is mainly thanks to MPEG.
MPEG started years ago what we call now digital transformation. MPEG fixed a set of key standards driving the electronic and media industry growth in last decades
Do you think MPEG is a good conduit for research?
- YES
- Can you comment on your MPEG experience?
As I said I did not participate directly but my team was very involved, it was also a way to grow young talented engineers in a stimulating environment where they could confront and interact at the same level with the best experts worldwide contributing to a common precompetitive goal.
- Are you happy with MPEG standards?
YES
- Do you think MPEG standards are the right choice?
YES
- What do you expect from MPEG in the future?
I think that under the guidance of Leonardo MPEG can pick other new challenges in the industry and social landscape, maybe in the field of AI setting rules and standards
- Are you or have you been an MPEG member?
I am an MPEG member since 1996.
- What do you think makes MPEG special?
MPEG has been a good portion of my life as an engineer. When I retire, MPEG is going to be a major part that can describe me.
- What do you think is the most important MPEG impact?
The daily use of MPEG standards in audio-visual product and services.
- Do you think MPEG is a good conduit for research?
Yes, MPEG has been a dominant front runner of new research items.
- Can you comment on your MPEG experience?
My MPEG experience is full of success, failure, friendship, and hope.
- Are you happy with MPEG standards?
Mostly yes.
- Do you think MPEG standards are the right choice?
Mostly yes.
- What do you expect from MPEG in the future?
MPEG is at the cross road of standardization and IPR. MPEG has to find a way to harmonize the two.
- Are you or have you been an MPEG member?
Yes I am and I have been with MPEG for last 20 years.
- What do you think makes MPEG special?
MPEG has played pivotal roles among industry, markets, research organizations, academia and country’s standard bodies, governments to develop necessiated standards from their requirements. Especially, MPEG has mostly been proactive in such standard developments by delivering the specifications for use.
- What do you think is the most important MPEG impact?
MPEG is the flower of the 3rd Industrial Revolution by Information Technology and it has accelerated into our daily life the fast penetration and easy use of new forms of digital media. MPEG’s video, audio and systems standards has greatly impacted the wide spread consumption of audiovisual contents everywhere and anytime over digital devices. Furthermore, the industry is also one of the most beneficiaries of MPEG technologies by which, I would like to say, ‘MPEG industry’ has been born with electronic components, equipment, devices and services that support the MPEG so that new higher value-added businesses became possible.
- Do you think MPEG is a good conduit for research?
MPEG has been an excellent place (even better than conference) for research. Actually, the roadmap of MPEG and standardization activities has helped many research organizations to win their national or industry projects. Also MPEG has been a good place for their works to be internationally standardized so that they could be used in industry and deployed in markets.
- Can you comment on your MPEG experience?
MPEG standard development has competitive and collaborative phases where many technical proposals with various ideas are inputted followed by intensive technical debates and verifications in the competitive phase. I think that this is a good combination of work processes in developing strong and competitive standards. I experienced that my initial technical proposals have gone through several revisions via tough evaluations and valuable comments and finally turned out to be improved levels of perfection, which I believe is a strong point of MPEG standardization. In general, in order for MPEG to produce the standard specifications of high technology-readiness levels, the chairmanship is important in evaluating and making decision on technical proposals with fairness and preciseness, which however has not been always taken place in such a way. Sometimes, the voices of some leading delegates and big companies have influenced the evaluation and decision on the technical proposals and the processes of standardization.
- Are you happy with MPEG standards?
Not always. MPEG has produced really useful and competitive standards which have been qickly adopted in markets/industry and deployed in services. However, since MPEG has expanded its scope of standardization into broad areas, many standardization activities are taken placed in MPEG, producing a number of MPEG standard specifications. Unfortunately, many of them are dying out without any use in industry and services.
- Do you think MPEG standards are the right choice?
Some MPEG standards are still very competitive compared to the existing privite technologies own by key players in industry. Especially, MPEG Video, Audio and Systems specifications are in such competitive categories. One of the MPEG having a strong competitiveness is that MPEG is still a strong pivotal place where more competitive standard specifications are being produced by several hundres of world experts than others. However, as mentioned in 6, other standard specifications do not seem to always useful and attractive outside MPEG.
- What do you expect from MPEG in the future?
I expect that MPEG will explore new key technologies and standarize them as it has always done. Traditional compression approaches to video and audio signals will see more saturation of coding efficiency improvement due to their structure and complexity limits. Importantly, it might be worthwhile for MPEG to explore future coding technologies such as video/audio coding technologies with deep neural networks (DNN) for hybrid coding technologies with DNN components and fully end-to-end DNN based coding technologies. Although edge computing with the current DNN architectures are very difficult to run in light-weight devices, it is expected that we will see in the future the new computational hardware architectures based on new materials and new electronic components, which would be best fitted for low-cost DNN computation. In such a day, I believe MPEG will face the 2nd blossoming season of MPEG media technologies.
- Are you or have you been an MPEG member?
Not really, not directly at least. I always been honored to be an MPEG supporter
- What do you think makes MPEG special?
“Everyone use it, only few know it” This is a fact! An huge number of people use MPEG daily, many times a day: listening digital radio, watching TV or even navigating on internet browsers or devices and much more than this, but only few people (experts) really know what is it.
- What do you think is the most important MPEG impact?
MPEG make possible to contents and media to be largely distributed to humans globally all over the entire planets and even outside that, in the space. Few other technologies have been so effective to spread contents to consumers.
- Do you think MPEG is a good conduit for research?
MPEG success is mainly due to thousand and thousand of researchers and engineers, whose intuitive ideas has consolidated in commercial products throughout their precious work. The success of those brilliant humans made possible the MPEG success.. Definitively, MPEG is indeed a good conduit for research,
- Can you comment on your MPEG experience?
I joined TV broadcasting sector when Audiovisual content was still analogue. My 40 year experience in Broadcast operation and TV production facilities design have been largerly devoted to migrate from analogue to digital, from digital TV production up to digital distribution, to digital home receivers, trough terrestrial, satellite or even IP distribution networks.
- Are you happy with MPEG standards?
Sure but, …never stop the train please… still a lot must be done!
- Do you think MPEG standards are the right choice?
Sure, in many cases, it is so…
- What do you expect from MPEG in the future?
I wonder if a standard for true multidimensional audiovisual codec, capable to be used for next generation spatial located audiovisual content will be available soon or late. Audiovisual need to abandon planoscopic rectangular dimension to enter the era of spatial multidimensional holo-projection is essential.
- 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.
