Leonardo Chiariglione
Convenor of MPEG
Abstract
The last few years have given a tasting of what the explosive combination of digital networks, digital media coding and content consuming devices can provide. The greatest impact has been felt on the media that require less bits for its representation, mostly audio. But the next few years will see the full maturity of the phenomena experienced just in a nutshell. The fixed networks will provide more and more transmission capacity, the broadcast channels will keep on increasing their offers, the mobile networks will become even more widespread, with higher transmission capacity and more flexible. More content will appear with more features. New content consuming devices will appear. The media industry has been caught so far unprepared by the rapid advent of digital technologies. But while they are gradually catching up, a new quantum leap in the evolution is going to change the landscape again. MPEG has recently started its latest standard project, MPEG-21 "Multimedia framework". Purpose of this project is to cater for the need of new standard solutions for the new landscape and to engage in the integration of existing solutions by providing the necessary glue. The talk will describe the current state of the project and its plan.