A Guided Tour – Riding the Media Bits

You can ride the digital media bits in many ways, even create your own roadmapp, but the table below suggests one that combines the sequence of events with a meaningful story. The suggested reading is organised in 21 chapters each subdivided in a variable number of sections. The structure is mostly sequential in time but also tries to accommodate the evolution of technology.

1	Why, How And For What	An introduction, a guided tour and a table of contents
2	The Early Communication	A brief review of communication in the history of mankind, the role of Public Authorities, why communication by digital means was preferable and why we need of compression of digital media
3	The Early Digital Communication	How digital communication technologies were first developed and deployed, a brief history of computing, how bits were stored and transmitted and why telecom bits are somewhat different from computer bits. Finally how a fault line in my professional life led to the creation of MPEG
4	Media Get Digital	A brief tale of the events that led to MPEG-1, the development of its 3 main technologies – Video, Audio and Systems, the role of reference software and conformance, a look inside MPEG-1 and what MPEG-1 has achieved.
5	Digital Media Get Better	A brief history of television and why it was so important to go digital, the development of 3 main MPEG-2 technologies – Video, Audio and Systems, a look inside MPEG-2, what MPEG-2 has achieved and how a bold global initiative tried to accelerate the deployment of digital television.
6	Standards, ISO And MPEG	Why standards are important, the role of patents, the MPEG way of developing standards, how an MPEG meeting unfolds and a sample of life in an international organisation like ISO
7	Works, Rights And Exploitation	Why it is difficult to achieve recognition of the value of some intellectual works, how technology helps the distribution of those works, how rights are defined and how they can be protected
8	Computers And Internet	The role of software and particularly operating system and how it is possible to to remove dependency of applications from it, how the current Graphical User Interface was developed, how computers achieved creation of pictures and sound, and how internet came to pervade our lives
9	Digital Media Do More	Before getting into the MPEG-4 story we have to recall how media came to meet computers, the development and the inside of the many MPEG-4 components, and what MPEG-4 has achieved
10	Software And Communication	How different bytes are made out of the same bits, a short story of Open Source Software and the MPEG relationships with it, how patents and standards create new forms of communication, trying to make digital media standards without patents and the myth of real-time person-to-person audio-visual communication
11	Digital Media For Machines	About adding descriptions to other data, the fascinating story of other internet technologies, the development and the inside of the MPEG-7 standard, how machines have begun to talk to other machines, what MPEG-7 has achieved and how we can make machines talk to other machines
12	More About Rights and Technologies	The many ways technology changes rights and their enforcements, how content protection can be opened, facing a world that MP3 has changed forever and equiring about why, if technology changes society, laws should not change
13	Frameworks For Digital Media	The development of MPEG-21, looking inside it, the story of the Digital Media Project, looking inside its specification, and opening the way for a deployment
14	Putting Digital Media Together	A brief description of the first batch of MPEG-A, the digital media integration standard, followed by 3 more Application Formats: Multimedia Preservation, Publish/Subscribe and Media Linking
15	More MPEG Triadic Technologies	Why there was a need of more Systems, Video and Audio standards: a short overview of what they do, and a standard to describe decoders and to build repositories of media coding tools
16	Technologies For Virtual Spaces	How MPEG-4 deals with 3D Graphics, how we can establish bridges between real and virtual worlds, how we can interact with digital media in a standard way and how an application format can help kickstart Augmented Reality
17	Systems And Services	How MPEG has standardised parts of the inside of devices, how I developed a business using standard technologies and how MPEG standards can be used to build a better internet of the future
18	Coping with an unreliable internet	Even though very little of what is called internet guarantees anything, our society is based on it. MPEG has developed standards that decrease the impact of internet reliability on its media.
19	More System-wide Digital Media Standards	Why we need MPEG-H, another integrated Systems-Video-Audio standard, how we can communicate over an unreliable internet, and looking inside MPEG-H for Systems, 2D and 3D Video, and Audio
20	Compression, the technology for the digital age	Compression has been MPEG’s bread and butter and the propulsive for digital media. But why should compression only apply to media? There are other digital sources that benefit from compression.
21	The future of media – immersion	So far the digital media experience has been largely based on extensions of early media technologies. Technology promises to provide virtual experiences that are undistinguishable from real ones.
22	Internet of Media Things	Internet of Things is a catch word that describes the ability of machines (things) to communicate and process information. MPEG is developing standards for the case when things are media things.
23	Glimpses Of The Future	About the – sometimes wild – ideas for future MPEG standards, the future of MPEG and the future of research
24	Acknowledgements	Thanking the many people without which we would be riding different media bits
25	Support Material	A detailed list of acronyms, the hall of fame of those who served or are still serving as MPEG Chairs, and the complete list of all MPEG standards (so far)