MPEG

Leonardo Chiariglione (b. 1943)

MPEG is a collection of associated standards for coding and compressing
audio-video data. As more people used video to communicate and the
applications that leverage those communications became more commercially
important, so too did the need for an international standard that provided
users with a uniform way to encode and transmit the content. Without it,
interoperability, compatibility, and market growth in this sector would have
been stymied or its evolution limited. Examples of innovation that were
outgrowths of these standards include MP3 players, CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray
Discs®, tablets, phones, cable boxes . . . and the list goes on.
The term MPEG stands for the Moving Picture Experts Group, the committee
established to develop and standardize the technologies that underpin the
protocols (which themselves have names like MPEG-1, MPEG­2, MPEG-3, and
MPEG-4). Established in 1988 as an international group led by Dr. Leonardo
Chiariglione, the MPEG working group fell under the JTC1 —Joint Technical
Committee—composed of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC),
responsible for overseeing and managing the standards for electronic or electric
technologies, and the broader International Organization for Standardization
(ISO).
The original MPEG-1 standard was set in 1992 for establishing compression of
lossy images and sound, in which unnecessary information is discarded with
little perceived degradation in quality at low bit rates— specifically 1.5
megabits per second. The protocol was primarily associated with making video
CDs and transmitting digital cable and satellite. MPEG-1 is also popularly
associated with the MP3 music standard. The MP3 (MPEG­1 Audio Layer III)
audio compression format is a patented audio codec developed by German
engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg (b. 1954) and others for compressing digital
audio that, uncompressed, takes up a lot of space. The ability to squeeze the
file size down with minimal loss of quality had a variety of practical
applications, perhaps most notably the ease of transmitting music files in an
era of limited bandwidth capacity. It was standards such as these, in
combination with other evolving network technologies, that would eventually
help usher in peer-to-peer file sharing and a host of other collaborative
innovations.
SEE ALSO Diamond Rio MP3 Player (1998), Napster (1999)
MPEG standards for coding and compressing audio-video data led to
innovations such as CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray Discs, and more.