Does streaming media need standards?
Published: 03 Nov 2003 13:10 GMT
The digital streaming media industry, without the benefit (or obstacle, depending on your point of view) of government mandate, faces the same issue. There are organisations that have not embraced open standards and continue to pursue proprietary video streaming technologies. Their argument is that with proprietary models, one company can make a more reliable, robust product that is easier to maintain -- for them.
But streaming media can only thrive if there one standard. It is now time to put an end to the "click here to view with this, that or the other player" -- not just to eliminate viewer confusion but also to reduce costs by eliminating the need for each streaming media content provider to host multiple systems.
Happily, robust multivendor standards and interoperability now exist, thanks to the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), the Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) and the MPEG Industry Forum (MPEGIF).
MPEG is a working group of the International Organization for Standardization, which is in charge of the development of standards for compressed audio and video. Formed in 1988, it produced the MPEG-1 standard in 1992, widely used for video on CD and for broadband streaming. This was followed by the wildly successful MPEG-2 standard in 1994, which today allows Hollywood movies to fit on a DVD. It is also the basis for satellite and digital cable, and it is used throughout corporations and educational institutions to provide live one-way and two-way video over both local and wide-area networks.
In 1998, MPEG-4 was completed, and it provided a video compression standard at rates that target the public Internet. MPEG-4 licensing issues were settled in 2002, and commercial products are shipping in volume now.
MPEG-4 is an open standard. Open standards foster competition for the best implementation of the standard. The open-standards approach means that the standard has many more people who scrutinise one another's work than is possible from a single vendor, resulting in a more stable -- and ultimately more satisfactory -- result. Obviously, open standards help reduce the possibility that a single vendor could hold customers hostage. And this standard, MPEG-4, rivals the proprietary audio and video in terms of image quality and audio fidelity.
It's the bandwidth, stupid!
With the growing popularity of broadband, there is now an audience for downloaded video clips, and more importantly, for live video. The distinction is important. You can download a video file regardless of your connection speed -- it just might take longer if you are on an analog modem. But live video of news, sports, stock market analysis and events is becoming common, thanks to a critical mass of viewers that have higher bandwidth capabilities.
Conventional television exists under government licences because it uses the public airwaves. Cable systems are only slightly less restrictive, yet there is a gatekeeper at the distribution entry point -- you can't just hook up to cable and begin to broadcast as you can with streaming media on the public Internet.
With established streaming video standards and low distribution costs, virtually anyone can now become a "TV station" and deliver audio and video of a quality that rivals that of conventional television broadcasters. The Food Channel may now have to compete with The Coin Collector's Channel or The 52-Year-Old Bald and Fat Man's Channel, along with thousands more.
This micro-segmentation is well under way, and standards have only accelerated it.
Rich Mavrogeanes is the founder and president of VBrick Systems, which specialises in streaming video solutions.
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