CHAPTER 1
Introduction
1.1. Scanning the Issue
MPEG-4, the multimedia standard that allows us to create, deliver, and consume audio-visual content in various qualities for various devices, and the only standard that offers the opportunity to create interactive content, has arrived, and is playing a significant role in today’s technology landscape.
After years of work by many dedicated engineers and scientists in the standardization bodies, a big chunk of media-compression technology has been standardized and published. But it isn’t over yet. MPEG-4, the international open standard still continues to grow, new technologies are continuously added, and new application possibilities are envisioned. At the same time, it is now the task of even more engineers and developers to combine the bits and pieces of specified technology and continue turning the standard into profitable products and services. To make this commercialization process successful, it is of the utmost importance that marketing strategists and business executives pick up a basic understanding of the technical opportunities offered by MPEG-4, in order to actively contribute their visions and to spawn their business ideas.
It is, however, not an easy task for people who are not concerned with developing media-compression technology on a daily basis to see all the potential and business opportunities slumbering in the technology that has been standardized. Not everyone has an engineering or science degree or has the time to stick her nose into literally hundreds of pages of specification documents. Picking up magazines and reading articles and press releases doesn’t necessarily help much, either, when it comes to better understanding MPEG-4. The entire specification of MPEG-4 has turned into an enormous body of work, which is difficult to master, answering questions concerning the practical merits offered by the standard. Furthermore, a lot of confusing statements have been published about MPEG-4, some in favor of the standard, and some carrying a lot of criticism, either expressed openly or compressed between the lines. Wild and sometimes puzzling performance claims have been made, mostly for the compression performance of video codecs. All sorts of rumors and opinions are circling around, originating from sources whose credibility is compromised by conflicting interests or questionable motivations (in fact, you would not believe how popular the element of gossip is in the jungle of technology media). All this together creates a situation that makes MPEG-4 an interesting media standard whose application benefits and business impact turn out to be difficult to understand, although some are in fact pretty evident and possible to describe.
Try picking up some technical papers and books to learn about MPEG-4 or even buy yourself a copy of the standards document from the International Organization for Standardization. Chances are that things will get even more confusing. One reason may be the sheer amount of new terminology, the excessive use of abbreviations, and the introduction of entirely new concepts that are difficult to evaluate and understand. The amount of technological items that have gone into the MPEG-4 toolbox is vast.
In reality, you do not need to be an algorithm impresario or compression guru to understand MPEG-4 and take advantage of it. As with many things in life, MPEG-4 is really about common sense. What many people do not realize is that not all pieces of the standard are equally valuable for building new products or any type of business. The big questions are how to navigate through this techno-jungle, and what choices are there for you to make. If you approach this as you would anything else in your “regular” professional life, you would ask yourself questions like, “How much does it cost, and how much can we make with it, and when?”; “How do we develop a gut feeling of what business opportunities MPEG-4 enables?”; “How can the imagination of my product specialists soar and create new ideas if MPEG-4 is so hard to understand?”; “Can we easily check if the wonderful ideas for new products and services product specialists have developed will benefit from the existence of the standard?”; “Are there alternative technologies that we can use?”; “Why should we base our products on an international and open standard in the first place?”.
In our business, we hear a lot of questions like, “What are the first applications that benefit from the new standard and when will they be available?” The first good news is that quite a few applications are already available, and are being deployed in a number of different industries covering a broad range of services with an enormous market potential. The second good news is that MPEG-4 as a standard is continuously being improved over time, which will guarantee competition, quality, markets and revenue potential. The products based on MPEG-4 standard will also continuously improve over time as companies and research institutions keep pushing the envelope to reach the theoretical as well as the practical limits of compression technology for all sorts of multimedia data. In coming chapters, we will elaborate more on this last aspect, which turns out to be important for appreciating the value that comes from having a standard.
1.2. Why Write Another Book on MPEG-4?
In fact, there are quite a number of excellent books that have been published recently, covering various technological aspects of MPEG-4 with varying level of detail. There are certainly a few books and publications to come in the near future, dealing with new technical aspects of the standard. However, most of those books focus on providing a detailed description of the technologies included in the MPEG-4 standard. Many technical articles have been published on the subject as well. However, the target audience for those more scientific articles is developers of hardware or software systems, undergraduate and graduate students of engineering schools, and other technologists who want to learn about the wealth of new technologies in MPEG-4.
Besides this technically oriented readership, there are business and press people, marketers, content creators, and artists, as well as analysts and other people who have a strong interest in technology and the markets driven or affected by media technologies. In other words, at the same time that technology professionals require well-founded information for their field of engagement, business professional require the same, but on a less technical, more explanatory and illustrative basis. Our target readers are such professionals that originally come from diverse markets, such as telecommunications, computers, consumer electronics, digital media business, and media production, to name just the more dominant examples.
It is necessary and helpful for all participants in the value creation chain to have a basic understanding of what a new technology can actually provide in terms of business-relevant features and benefits. It is also necessary to be able to distinguish between the true merits and the limitations of a standard such as MPEG-4, as well as to know the pitfalls and recognize the hype. This book tries to offer insights into the whys and hows of the standard and what impact MPEG-4 has on various businesses and markets. The authors provide basic technical insights, spiced up with personal views, comments and opinions on how to look at the various technological gems in MPEG-4 from a business-oriented viewpoint.
That is, this book does not contain mathematical formulas or detailed technical descriptions of the standard. This is no handbook to read while the soldering iron is heating up or while your compiler is powering up as you start building things. We are trying to provide a sense of the scope and the various capabilities and opportunities the standard offers. The book tries to embody what we like to call “the sauna approach,” that is, explaining things in an easy-to-understand manner so that you can chat about MPEG-4 while sitting in a sauna, which we all probably should do more often. Overall, we are trying to make our contribution to avoiding the next Internet bubble blast, by going behind the scenes of MPEG-4 and providing an understandable illustration of this exciting multimedia standard.
Finally, we would like to offer some personal views on what may happen in the future with MPEG-4 and with international standardization in general, a look at the threads and the opportunities.
1.3. Understanding Technology
Executives, by the nature of their job, need to make business-relevant decisions. In this context, it is obviously advantageous to be informed or briefed about the matter at hand so that a coherent judgment can be made. Executives do not need to know, for example, all the mysterious secrets of the MPEG-4 standard; they merely need a well-founded, basic, but precise knowledge of the standard, and they especially need to know what sort of business-relevant features and benefits there will potentially be. Another requirement for business executives is to be able to differentiate between the merits and the limitations of a standard such as MPEG-4, as well as to know where to expect potential problems. The emphasis of this book, therefore, is on offering some insights on why the standard is the way it is and what impact MPEG-4 has on various businesses and markets.
1.4. Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the members of the MPEG community, more specifically, Olivier Avaro, Vittorio Baroncini, Ulrich Benzler, Karlheinz Brandenburg, Mark Buxton, Leonardo Chiariglione, Stephan Herrman, Carsten Herpel, Andreas Hutter, Andre´ Kaup, Rob Koenen, Peter Kuhn, Didier LeGall, Tobias Oelbaum, Fernando Perreira, Thomas Sikora, Gerhard Stoll, Gary Sullivan, T. K. Tan, C. J. Tsai, and Michael Wollborn.
The authors would also like to acknowledge the support and multiple teachings of Steve Edelson, Manuel Cubero, Joe Hahn, Ivar Formo, Gude Gudesen, Hans Herrmann Horn, Martin Jacklin, Stephan Keszler, Philipp Kraetzer, Ken Brooks, John Hodgkinson, Nick Flaherty, Fadi Malak, Harald Martens, Birger Nergaard, David Price, Thomas Ramm, Jan Otto Reberg, Klaas Schüür, Peter Schuster, and Bene Wiedenmann.
Finally, we would like to thank our editor, Joanne Tracy, for her continued encouragement, and patience.