Video’s importance has evolved dramatically over the last decade. Television is now at the lowest viewership levels it has seen since its inception. The effectiveness and impact of its advertising message is reduced, yet the cost of delivering that message remains high. As a result, advertisers seek alternate destinations for their advertising spending, and one of the most popular is the burgeoning world of online, on-demand video.
It makes sense: The message can be delivered more accurately, and the cost is lower. The near-universality of broadband, the extraordinary capabilities of modern PCs and the remarkable richness of multimedia content have made Internet video successful. Any emergent technology that attracts marketplace attention also invites innovative behavior, which translates into product and service differentiation, competition for primacy, and lower consumer cost.
Standards organizations have the responsibility to harmonize the different approaches that developers take in their zeal to innovate. They must develop recommendations that offer a single approach for product development, while at the same time providing enough room for operational interpretation to avoid stifling creativity.
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) have developed the majority of modern video standards. The ITU approaches standards from the perspective of the networks over which video is delivered and focusing on the transported content. Both are widely used and remarkably compatible.
Figure 1: Timeline showing relative release dates of common video encoding standards
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