[M4IF Discuss] What is the REAL advantage?

[Ben Waggoner]

Sanjay,
    The critical feature of MPEG-4 is interoperability.  Content created by
any compliant tool can be served by any compliant server and play back in
any compliant player, even if they're all from different vendors (within the
same Profile   Level).
    Proprietary formats obviously can't offer this.
    How important the interoperability is relative to player ubiquity and
encoder cost will vary hugely by the industry.
    MPEG-4's first big successes are unlikely to be in head to head
competition against QuickTime, Windows Media, and RealVideo.  MPEG-4's
initial wins will be in areas where those technologies don't provide a
complete solution today.
Ben Waggoner
Interframe Media <http://www.interframemedia.com>
Digital Video Compression Consulting, Training, and Encoding
on 2/4/02 10:28 AM, Sanjay Kulkarni at kulkarniS   dvd.panasonic.com wrote:
> I would like to use this board to clarify my basic doubt about using the
> MPEG-4 format for streaming media.
> 
> I am doing a study to provide streaming media solutions for consumers and am
> considering formats like Windows Media, QuickTime, Real and MPEG4. What is
> the real advantage of providing an MPEG-4 based streaming media solution?
> Quality/bandwidth issues apart, I am of the opinion that licensing would be
> the killer to launching this format in the market (again, this is a
> comparative statement to the rest of the streaming media formats). Not to
> mention that the rest of the players are already popular in the market and
> their codecs are cheaply (if not freely) available.
> 
> Any comments would be appreciated. Thanks!