Industry Perspective: Don’t Believe the Hype—MPEG-4 Lives On

Industry Perspectives is a new StreamingMedia.com feature that brings you analysis and insight on the crucial trends, challenges, and technologies in the field today, from some of the most respected names in streaming.

Rich Mavrogeanes is founder and CTO of VBrick Systems, Inc., as well as a member of the Internet Streaming Media Alliance's board of directors.

Back in 1995, the sweetheart of the telecommunications rodeo was Asynchronous Transfer Mode, or ATM. If you believed the industry hype, it was easy to believe that ATM was going to cure cancer and win the war. ATM is a standard, defined in the International Telecommunication Union and refined and promoted by the ATM Forum. By 1997, ATM was pronounced dead by the same journalists who built it up. Of course, a funny thing happened on the way to the graveyard: ATM revenues doubled that same year. Today, ATM still carries the bulk of the Internet's traffic in carrier backbones, while other multi-vendor standards —such as IEEE 802.x—have exploded in the last mile or last meters of delivery.

So it is amusing and somewhat encouraging to hear recently that MPEG-4 was pronounced dead by companies promoting proprietary technology. The pronouncement probably ends the hype phase and allows MPEG-4 to go to work.

Some people miss the whole point of standards-based versus proprietary technology. Rather than vendors competing for unique proprietary solutions, standards allow them to compete for the best implementation. Through vendor-specific innovation, MPEG-2, for example, has been dramatically improved since its birth in 1994 while maintaining compatibility with the standard. Rather than the limited resources of a single vendor being applied to a problem, standards allow a worldwide technical community to build on each other's work to produce improved technology that results in better, and interoperable, products for everyone. In so doing, they move the industry ahead.

"MPEG-4" is not a single, monolithic entity, and comparisons to Windows Media 9, RealVideo, or other proprietary encoders and decoders are problematic. It is likely that any proprietary codec will always exhibit higher quality than any standard, just like proprietary networking technology will always exhibit faster characteristics that go further than any multi-vendor standard. I don’t know about you, but I’m unlikely to buy a new wireless NIC for my PC—even if the card offers great throughput for a ten-mile range—if I cannot connect to anyone else, or perhaps worse, can connect to only one vendor.