Awarding Standards Innovations in Entertainment
2005-09-28
By the end of the 1996 Emmy Awards, the cast and crew of Frasier had racked up four golden statuettes, including one for Outstanding Comedy Series.
Eight years later, after 11 seasons, the series ended leaving devoted fans without their favourite show. But, like many other television series today, fans can buy each season of Frasier on DVD. By simply popping the disk into their player, they can watch their favourite episode whenever they want.
While most people probably take this technology for granted, DVDs would not exist if it weren’t for another award-winner at the 1996 Emmys.
On October 1st of that year, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences presented its Engineering Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Technological Development to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Committee’s (IEC) Moving Pictures Experts Group – better known to the world as MPEG.
André Vincent, Manager of Advanced Video Systems at the Communications Research Centre, is among the 30 Canadians who participated in the MPEG group through the Standards Council of Canada (SCC). As Canada’s national accreditation body, the SCC promotes voluntary standardization across the country and coordinates Canadian involvement in international standards work.
Vincent says the Emmy won by MPEG was well-deserved.
"Certainly, in many applications there is an absolute need for this standard," he says. "Without it, I think we would have a large number of non-interoperable systems and it would be a very chaotic situation."
The MPEG standards have been a great development for entertainment technology. When video and audio files are created, they are incredibly large. For example, a two-hour movie may take up 90 gigabytes of storage while the average DVD can only hold between 4.7 and 17 gigabytes.
MPEG standards were created as a way to store those extra 80 gigabytes.
The group found that there are many repetitions between frames in movie files, which take up a lot of space. It also realized that many of the individual pixels making up each frame could be removed without interfering with the picture. The MPEG standard calls for the removal of these redundant pieces of information, resulting in a compressed file size without compromising the quality.
The MPEG standard has in turn enabled the development of new technologies.
"Since equipment manufacturers have a standard, they know that it creates a stabilizing technology," says Vincent. "They can go ahead and implement these technologies into chips or into software. Products will follow from this."
Vincent says having common guidelines is very important in entertainment technologies. Without them, there would only be confusion.
"You can’t have more than one television standard," he says. "Broadcasters all have to agree on one emission standard so that manufacturers can produce receivers that everybody can buy and be sure to receive every signal."
This goal of achieving an interoperable system was the driving force that helped to create the MPEG committee in 1988.
At its first meeting, MPEG consisted of 25 experts who worked in two phases to create the MPEG standard. The result was the MPEG-1 standard and the rapid growth of the group. Today, the original 25 experts have grown to 350 experts representing 200 companies from 20 countries.
"That’s the good thing about MPEG," says Vincent. "It brought under an umbrella a large number of research organizations."
Like ISO’s renowned management systems standards ISO 9000 and ISO 14000, MPEG is actually a family of standards: MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. And, each member of the family is very different. MPEG-1 is used for developing media applications while MPEG-2 is designed for broadcasting applications. MPEG-2 has had the most impact as applications such as digital and cable television; DVDs are also based on this standard.
Finally MPEG-4 is used in multimedia in order to allow quality video to be transmitted quickly over the Internet.
However video hasn’t been the sole preoccupation of the MPEG group. In fact, the standards created for compressing audio files may have had an even greater impact than video.
The standard for audio compression emerged alongside video in a form known as MPEG audio Layer-3 or MP3. "MP3 of course is used for downloading music so the MP3 audio format is very, very well-known and very well utilized," says Vincent.
But very well-known and very well utilized may be an understatement as MPEG is involved in more Hollywood hits than even the biggest stars.
And, at the same time, MPEG has certainly paid off for the entertainment industry.
"Technology would not have moved as fast," says Vincent. "And many applications would not be possible without MPEG."
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