Write a 300 – 500 word article that tells the audience about a recent multimedia technology that is being or has been developed in the last six months and explain what you think the impact of this technology will have upon society.
The word multimedia describes a lot of different technologies that allow visual and audio media to be joined in new ways for principles of communication.
Today the Multimedia communications increase day by day in the modern societies. Until recently, and except for broadcast television and radio, voice was still the only communication device. However, the diffusion of digital processing algorithms and hardware has brought images, music, and video into everyday life.
The availability of open standards (such as JPEG, MPEG-X Audio and Video, H.26X) has had a main impact on this development, notably due to the easy interoperability. Such standards have made the creation, and communication of (digital) data aimed at our most important senses, sight and hearing, simple, cheap and everyday. With time, multimedia standards have addressed a growing set of fields from coding and metadata to rights management and content edition, following the increasing functional and technical of multimedia applications.
Digital multimedia communications, from television, video telephony, and Internet and mobile streaming to digital storage and music downloading, are nowadays a central part of modern life. It is mainly recognized that MPEG standards, this means the standards developed by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), have played and still play a major role in the starting and development of multimedia communications since they have showed the value of interoperability in the context of this type of applications.
When MPEG was started, in 1988, several important technologies were suitable enough to open new ways to deliver multimedia content to end users. In the middle of were audio and image/video compression, VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) technology, optical storage, and high-speed delivery of digital information over phone lines. This fact was recognized by some consumer electronics and telecommunications companies, which had the vision that by setting standards for audio and video coding, they would create a market from which they could all benefit. They believed that providing interoperability was crucial, and that would not reduce their chances to develop successful products, but rather the opposite. Moreover this interoperability would be provided without preventing competition and excellence, by specifying only the minimum number of tools for interoperability and leaving open space for the compatible products to make out themselves.
Based on this vision, MPEG has set many widely used standards since its establishment. Following the development of multimedia applications, the group has expanded its range from basic coding technologies to technologies supporting and complementing the audio and video compression formats such as synchronization, multiplexing, composition, graphics, metadata, and intellectual property management and protection. This process of answering to the industry needs, already started with MPEG-1, when MPEG realized that just setting audio and video compression formats would not be enough since something more was needed to support synchronization, storage and delivery. The same analysis underpins the evolution of MPEG standards which always include a growing set of technologies targeting the condition to the user of the necessary set of tools to build increasingly more multipart products for the envisioned application scenarios.
