Digital Media Get Better

One-to-many communication seems to be a business blessed by the blindfolded goddess. Newspapers are one of the first and, until recently, the most successful of such businesses. Coveted, pampered, feared, lured, controlled or suppressed by Public Authorities, they are incredibly powerful tools to shape public opinion – if content entices…

At the very first meeting in Ottawa, MPEG had set for itself an initial work plan based on three targets: substandard definition television as provided by SIF (1/4 of SDTV) at up to about 1.5 Mbit/s, standard definition television at up to 5 Mbit/s and high definition television at up…

The first open MPEG-2 “session” took place in Porto in July 1990. Months before, while in search for a meeting host for this ever-growing MPEG group, I had asked Prof. Artur Pimenta Alves of INESC to host the July 1990 meeting during a COST 211 working dinner at Ipswich. He…

As with MPEG-1, the Audio work in MPEG-2 took a different turn from its original direction. MPEG-1 Audio already provided an excellent way to compress stereo audio, exactly what many broadcasters were thinking of providing as a first step in their soon-to-come digital services. But some expected that the future…

The development of the MPEG-2 Audio and Video standards required the best experts in digital audio and video processing, but the development of the Systems part required seasoned engineers, a species in scarce supply today, so much so that we may no longer be able to access their unique expertise…

Unlike MPEG-1, where a reference model strictly need only consider the decoder, the full extent of the MPEG-2 standard requires consideration of the complete chain from source to destination for the DSM-CC part. The figure below gives a schematic representation of the scope of the MPEG-2 standard. The Source of…

The radio spectrum is sliced for use by a multitude of services and the VHF/UHF band assigned to terrestrial television broadcasting is very narrow. Spectrum scarcity used to make television a great business to be in, first because the number of broadcasters in any given market is reduced to a…

In 1992 and 1993 I was looking with interest at the developments in Europebearing the name “European Project on Digital Broadcasting”. Seeing what was brewing in Europe, the VADIS Strategic Advisory Group asked me to organise a “European Seminar on Digital Television”. This was held in Geneva hosted by the…