[M4IF Discuss] News: Steve Jobs: MPEG-4 is the next big thing

[Craig Birkmaier]

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-932474.html
Steve Jobs: MPEG-4 is the next big thing
By Joe Wilcox
Special to ZDNet News
June 5, 2002, 4:00 AM PT
Is MPEG-4 video technology the next big thing? Apple Computer's Steve 
Jobs thinks so.
On Tuesday the company released a public preview of QuickTime 6, 
Apple's proprietary media player. What was unusual about it was the 
absence of a final licensing agreement with a patent group that holds 
the rights to MPEG-4, a next-generation compression format for video 
and audio and the technology that QuickTime is built around.
Jobs says that Apple is close to making a pact with MPEG LA, a 
licensing body representing 18 patent holders that have claims on 
MPEG-4 technology. Yet prior delays and debates with the group could 
still derail those plans.
In an interview with CNET News.com, the Apple CEO talked about the 
range of MPEG-4 technology and also touched on new plans to make the 
eMac available for the retail market.
Q: Is your release of the QuickTime 6 preview a sign that licensing 
issues for MPEG-4 have been worked out?
A: The licensing stuff is getting worked out. It isn't totally worked 
out yet. Every "i" is not dotted and every "t" is not crossed, but 
it's getting there. I have a lot of confidence it will. This is too 
important not to get worked out. We'll be shipping QuickTime 6 as 
part of Jaguar, our next major release of Mac OS X, which ships later 
this summer. I expect stuff will be worked out by then.
What does QuickTime 6 mean for Apple and its customers?
If you recall, Apple sort of invented digital video with QuickTime. 
Everybody kind of went their own way eventually, with Apple having 
its own proprietary codecs and RealNetworks having its own 
proprietary codecs and Microsoft having its own proprietary codecs. 
And the one thing--and it has kind of been a Tower of Babel--is 
MPEG-2. As you know, that was the breakthrough that really created 
the DVD industry, and MPEG-2 is used today by every DVD and every DVD 
player. It is an international standard. MPEG-2 still delivers the 
best video quality around. It is the gold standard. So people started 
realizing this is what we need for digital video that we're going to 
use for streaming and other uses at lower bandwidth. The same group 
that created MPEG-2 created MPEG-4, which is the next, new 
international standard for digital video, for streaming and for other 
uses.
What's so great about MPEG-4?
It delivers video quality as good as MPEG-2 at about one-third less 
the bit rate. But then you can crank down the bit rate for lower 
bandwidth connections and it scales down beautifully. So you can 
deliver incredible streaming video with MPEG-4. It has got higher 
quality than anything out there--including Microsoft's upcoming 
Corona--and it's totally scalable. Everybody's jumping on this 
bandwagon. We've announced we're going to switch over to MPEG-4. Real 
has said they're going to. All the cell phone companies are going to 
be using it; it is the standard for third-generation cell phone video 
streaming. It also features AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) audio, which 
is the best audio around. It blows away MP3 (and) Windows Media. And 
it also is the audio format adopted by all satellite radio 
(companies). So this is gathering a tremendous amount of steam, and I 
think everybody is going to be cutting over to MPEG-4, with the 
possible exception of Microsoft, which is going to try and push its 
Corona technology that comes out later this year. They haven't gone 
into a preview or beta mode yet, but they said they were going to 
release it sometime this year.
How important do you think MPEG-4 will be to opening the barriers 
that block digital media?
I think it's going to be exactly like what MPEG-2 did. It's going to 
create whole new industries, because it's going to create a world 
standard. MPEG-2 created the whole DVD industry. I think MPEG-4 is 
going to be really big. QuickTime 6 is the first real implementation 
of MPEG-4 to be released. Not only is it a client, but with QuickTime 
Streaming Server and QuickTime Broadcaster, which allows real-time 
broadcasting of MPEG-4, we're providing an end-to-end solution for 
MPEG-4. And of course, it's compatible with all MPEG-4-compliant 
players.
Many authors create their content in QuickTime. How important is 
getting there first with MPEG-4?
Apple has pretty much historically always gotten there first. It got 
there first with digital video and QuickTime. I think that Apple 
always has had the highest-quality stuff and been a little ahead. But 
what we're doing here that's different is we're adopting a standard. 
We're not off doing our own thing. We are adopting the next big 
standard. It's sort of like adopting TCP/IP or adopting HTML. This is 
the next one of those.
With Mac OS X and other products, Apple has been pushing more open, 
rather than proprietary, standards.
Absolutely. I think the list of open standards we are supporting now 
is long--everything from PDF (Portable Document Format) for our 
imaging model, OpenGL for our 3D model, to Unix itself--FreeBSD Unix, 
which is totally open sourced with Darwin--to obviously all the 
communications protocols we support, which are all open standards. 
It's a lot of stuff. We do great implementations of them, and we 
really do believe in open standards. It's working for us. We have 
customers calling us up now about Mac OS X who wouldn't even talk to 
us when we banged on their door before with Mac OS 9 or its 
predecessors. We're getting a lot of interest because of this 
strategy. As you may know, in Jaguar our whole directory service is 
going to LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). There's a lot 
of support in our customer base for this and, again, we're able to 
attract a lot of new customers.
Rest of story truncated.
-- 
Regards
Craig Birkmaier
Pcube Labs