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

MPEG-4 part-10 (also known as H.264 or "Advanced Video Codec") gives today's best proprietary codecs a run for their money. But even as this technology becomes mainstream there will likely be rapid improvements in proprietary codecs. So any argument that we should "wait" for advancements before establishing standards would naturally result in never establishing standards at all—because advances will never stop. Better to have standards that embrace technological advances, such as those developed by the Internet Streaming Media Alliance, but with some assurance of backward compatibility.

You can be sure that shortly after you deploy one proprietary codec, your supplier will encourage you to "upgrade" to the new one. There is nothing wrong with such a business model: it is, after all, how the software industry works. Standards-based solutions operate the same way, but they provide for multi-vendor, multi-platform solutions and ensure backward compatibility to that standard.

Standards set the stage for industry growth by assuring a minimum level of quality and interoperability. I am quite confident that I can send a fax to virtually anyone with a fax machine, thanks to fax standards. But if you have the same vendor’s fax machine I have, my fax machine might decide to go into its proprietary super-mode, bypass the standard, and send you the document in a different way. Fine with me…I remain confident I can send a fax to anyone—and if I find super-mode useful I might encourage you to buy one from this vendor too (although frankly, I don’t find the super-mode so useful).

You may observe the importance of Windows Media, along with MPEG-4, in the DVD Forum's provisional standard. With Microsoft's submission of WM9 to SMPTE, perhaps the standards argument for Windows Media vs. MPEG-4 will become moot. But until WM9 is approved and until it is available as an open, multi-vendor standard, there are many companies who are too nervous to put all of their eggs in the Microsoft basket. And what will we do when there is an advanced WM10 that best runs on a "new, improved Operating System"?